In 2022 the Toronto Public Library came to us with a problem: Toronto voters didn't have the resources to make education voting decisions. Our goal was to learn as much as we could about voters and candidates to build a platform that helped both parties.

Prototype

User Research

Note: I won't go into too much detail on the research front as this is a showcase. To see an example of my research and discovery process check out Modernizing Health Data.

Methodology

1. Surveys: We knew that confidence in the democratic system has been waning as can be seen in this report from Stats Canada. From our surveys we were able to find a proto-target group of what we'll call "community leaders" that are engaged and engaging.
2. User Interviews: Candidates are already a perfect target group and, thanks to our survey responses we were able to recruit our "community leader" interviewees. We ran 12 interviews with each group.
3. Usability Testing: During prototyping we performed usability testing of the public-facing platform and the CMS for voters and candidates, respectively. Each test included 5-6 testers.

Branding

As this was a Toronto Public Library product, it was necessary to align with TPL's branding guidelines. However, as youth civic engagement was low, we wanted to give the site a youthful feel. This was easy with TPL's branding. Shout out to trajectory for their work with TPL! 👊🏻

Screens

Future Iterations

General Voter Education

While this first iteration is based on helping voters learn about candidates and get links to voter information for election day, it wasn't within scope to create a more broad education space. This can be useful for voters who want to know more about the process and their role but we were also aware of TPL's student education initiatives, which we would love to support.

White label Platform

A platform like this can be useful across cities, provinces, municipalities, etc. but it can also be useful in non-government contexts. We purposefully designed and developed the platform to be brand-agnostic, based on reusable components, and accessible to make white labelling easier.

Candidate and Community Leader Analytics

We built basic analytics into the platform for candidates. This is currently used to show candidates how many people are reading their answers and sharing their page. Of course, if a candidate has not submitted their answers they can see the missed opportunity.
The next milestone would include more robust analytics to help candidates and community leaders measure their impact and determine the appropriate effort to put into the platform.