Impact at a glance
Co-creation workshops organized
Front and backstage touchpoints incorporated
Stakeholders consulted and presented to
View the prototype
Building a service map was the first step to understanding how the Elections Ontario app fit into their broader mandate of making voting easy. We listed the steps for both service users (voters) and the provider (Elections Ontario) within each of six stages that were outlined for us in the client brief.
I designed our rapid research workshop, in which we asked our peers to identify areas wherein they might expect to experience obstacles related to efficiency, security, and accessibility. Our participants expressed that these were especially relevant during the management of voter information.
We knew that verifying voter information was sometimes a manual process. This highlighted the need for sufficient staffing.
The accelerated research process made it difficult to generate several different ideas, many of which overlapped. To disrupt our thinking patterns, we challenged ourselves to think of ideas from the perspective of the service provider.
I proposed the idea of adding a job board feature to the app, where users could find opportunities to work the election. By calibrating opportunities against electoral district, Elections Ontario could better control their recruitment strategy and secure the sizable talent pool needed to support election operations.
Starting with election day opportunities acts as a proof of concept for promoting off-season opportunities, thereby incentivizing year-round usage.
We used StoryTribe to outline how users would discover the app, as well as visualize all the parts of the service involved.
Our idea centers future voters as the primary user group for the app. Youth aged 16-18 are eager to gain volunteer and work experience. So what happens if we leverage their registration as an entry point to working the election?
Our hypothesis:
Users begin a relationship with Elections Ontario even before they can vote, which can combat political apathy
Users directly witness and contribute to easy voting processes, which can quell misconceptions that voting is too much effort
My biggest takeaway
The end user of a product or service is just one of several key actors involved when designing experiences. Initially, we gravitated towards improving the voter experience in spite of staffing issues that might occur. But as soon as we looked at improving staffing processes to prevent those issues in the first place, better ideas came to the surface. It was a great reminder that human-centered design crucially considers these perspectives, too.