Designing for the Voter Experience: Learning from Voters
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A presentation at Future of California Elections, 2016 from a panel with Santa Cruz County Clerk Gail Pellerin, Daniel Newman from Maplight, and Los Angeles County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Dean Logan. The first presentation showed before-and-after examples of new designs for voter guide. This one focused on some highlights of what we learned in our research over the past 2 years that we can put to work to make elections more inviting to voters – especially new voters, with an example about how to explain primary elections in California.
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Designing for the Voter Experience: Learning from Voters
- 1. Designing for the Voter Experience Learning from Voters Whitney Quesenbery Center for Civic Design @civicdesign | @whitneyq | civicdesign.org Future of California Elections 2016 February 25, Los Angeles
- 2. Make voters feel like experts ...not students "Human-Centered Design for the Voting Experience" Stanford Social Innovation Review
- 3. How long will I have to be there? - New citizen, Pasadena I don't know too much about voting. That's why I stopped doing it. - 21 year old, Modesto I do have one question. What do you actually do when you vote? - 18 year old, Baltimore
- 4. Election terminology is a barrier to bridging the civic literacy gap Information gaps There are options for how and when you vote You can get a new ballot if you make a mistake The whole idea of provisional ballots You can vote if you are in line when the polls close You can vote after a conviction for a felony What is a primary election?
- 5. Trying to explain primaries Los Angeles County Easy Voter Guide Orange County
- 6. Primary election... What's that? What's different? Who can vote? What happens? Who do we vote for? Why do it like this?
- 7. The secret is usability testing With many different types of voters Senior centers, public libraries, county offices, schools, cultural centers
- 8. How voters get information: Best practices manual and webinars https://cavotes.org/download-best-practices-manual Resources for creating voter guides Templates, guides and samples http://civicdesign.org/resources-for-creating-voter-guides/ Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent 10 volumes of design guidelines for election design http://civicdesign.org/fieldguides/
- 9. Thank you.
Editor's Notes
- Thanks to Gail Pellerin for some great examples of how we can design voter information for a better voter experience. I'd like to talk about what we learned in our research over the past 2 years that we can put to work to make elections more inviting to voters – especially new voters.
- As Kate Lydon says in her article about the work with Los Angeles County, too many voters feel like students, not experts. This is a problem for new voters, especially if they come from a household without a strong tradition of voting... and especially if they are also new citizens. When we talk to people just on the cusp between non-voting and voting, they are often excited about the possibilities. They can talk eloquently about democracy and having a voice and the power of participation.
- But then, they get very quiet, because they are rarely sure of the details. The mechanics of elections are a mystery. There just so much that people without a history of voting – among friends or family – simply don't know. When we ask them what questions they had or information they wanted about an election, they often had no way to even get started. They wanted to know what they didn't know, and couldn't even frame the question.
- It's hard to listen to over 200 voters and not come to the conclusion that election terminology – how we explain elections, as well as the complexity of the rules, is a huge barrier to helping people over the civic literacy gap to becoming informed, effective voters. When we tested the voter bill of rights, some absolutely basic concepts and rights were new information. Each one of these concepts also has a term of art behind it: Vote by mail Spoiled ballots Provisional ballots Precincts But one of our biggest challenges was how to explain primary elections, and the Top Two Primary
- We tried a lot of things, but the problem was so bad that we had to take it out of the testing because it was failing so badly. We kept trying with some versions we thought were prety good. None of them worked! All of them had something good, but in the end, people still had trouble getting to even a basic understanding they were confident in. So, we kept trying. In the last rounds, as we started getting closer, we went through half a dozen versions in 3 or 4 days of testing. The key in the end was to listen carefully to what was confusing, rephrase it as a question, and then provide the answer, sticking as close as we can to the legal language. Let me show it to you...
- I've shown this to you rolling down the page. But the real success was when people started explaining what they had just read by identifying the three columns and then showing us how the answers differed. It may not be perfect, but for the first time, we saw real voters starting to understand the incredible complexity of primary elections in California.
- We didn't get here just because we are so smart or such great designers. We got here by listening – carefully to voters. By taking their confusions seriously, and finding ways to combine the right words with the