Context: A quick speculative exercise to develop a simple UI concept.
Goals: To create ongoing connection between constituents and their US Congressional representatives.
Tools Used: Sketch App, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, hand sketching.
Additional information: This concept is in early stages and still needs additional improvements and refinement, including user testing and visual development. For now this is just a quick exercise in user interface design and structure, though I hope to develop the concept further in the next few days, and export it to an interactive prototype that can be tested with users.
Once we vote our Senators and Representatives into office they go off to Washington and we generally lose touch. It can be difficult beyond the big headline issues to keep track of how they vote, but My Voice aims to keep us more connected to the people who are our voice in the federal government.
The app is kept purposely as simple as possible and the central concept is really contained in the lock screen notification — a way to keep tabs in real time with how your Congressional representatives have voted on major issues.
The setup is as quick as possible, only requiring a zip code (zip+4 in dense urban areas where multiple districts are contained in a single zip code) and confirmation that you want to follow all three members of your delegation. There's also an option to add additional members, if you'd like to follow leadership, your hometown reps, or others, up to a maximum of six. For most people, though, those three will be enough, and from there they just need to confirm if they want push and/or email notification of votes.
After that, regardless of their notifications, the user can open up the list of recent major votes to see how their reps have voted on the issues. The feed can be sorted by senator/representative with the buttons at the top or searched with the black bar at the bottom. There are also links at the top back to the Settings screen and to an information & resources page (not yet designed). Finally, clicking on the thumbnail of a rep takes you to that person's profile page, with contact info, committee memberships, and additional information.
I've built a basic interactive prototype in Marvel, with some changes based on user feedback to make the user flow a bit more intuitive and a few interactions easier to use. A few things are lacking due to limitations of the Marvel platform, but the basic flow should be clear. One thing missing is the modals that will give some guidance on the first use — I hope to post those in the next couple of days. Once those are ready to go, I'm hoping to do some more user testing for further refinement.
