Role: UX Researcher and Visual Designer | Team of 5

Skills coverage: UX Research, Service Design, Visual Design

Duration: 10 weeks

Maintaining users

Website redesign. Key pages brand new IA 

• Unboarding tutorial with main functions

• User information panel

• Improved information visualization

• Eliminates duplication of proposals

• Direct access to proposals and budgets

Reaching to a new audience

Hierarchy of communication campaigns to promote citizen participation according to the number of votes

• Featured in Decide Madrid web

• Advertising and social media presence

• Totems in the proposal's location

• Physical actions "Bota para apoyar tu propuesta"

• Boradcast on M21 channels

Challenge

Decide Madrid is an online platform promoted by the city council that enables citizen participation in proposals and municipal budgets.

The challenge that proceeded to face was to increase the level of participation and engagement of the platform's users among young people between 20 and 34 years old through by improving the voting experience.

Solution: a phygital vote

Exploring the possibilities offered by participatory technologies and collective processes that are transforming cities in the information age, we designed an interactive voting experience intended to transform the physical interaction into a digital vote.

Research

1. Immersive first approach

We started by an extended secondary research within various forums, newspapers and blogs, as well as any other participatory and voting processes, to pool some valuable general pains to guide and delimit our future research.

2. Secondary research

We attended ConsulCon, Democratic Cities in Madrid, a space for experts to rethink the future of cities from the prism of social transformation and citizen participation. We were able to talk to one of the speakers and we addressed the future of participation, random democracy and deliberation processes to gather insights for our project.

3. Primary research

We conducted 43 guerrilla interviews in different public places of Madrid  to try to converge our Problem Statement. We didn't discriminate people by age to gather as many points o f view as possible. 

4. Converging 

We sent an online questionnaire about the platform features and the user's opinion of a sample made up of 58 young people in the predefined age range (20 to 35 years old) residents in Madrid and then conducted 3 in depth interviews with regular users of Decide Madrid. Both the research and the survey results were crucial in redefining our challenge.

Insights

“Decide Madrid does not offer me a platform with which I can interact in a simple way, therefore, I am not participating in the initiative.”

“I do not use the platform because I do not fully understand its purpose and I relate it to political issues.”

Key learnings and verbatims

- Of the 58 respondents, 76% would like to participate and actively propose improvements but do not know Decide Madrid.

- 15% know the platform but have never voted.

“Uploading and proposing projects are quite confusing. There are two ways to upload projects and the difference is not clear."

"It is pretty accesible and has a notification by mail system of new proposals for voting."

“I don't use it because I'm not interested in politics.”

"I don't know where to look for information, it's a pretty complicated website."

Ideation process

How might we increase the level of participation and engagement of the platform's users among young people between 20 and 34 years old through an improvment in the voting experience?

Once the Problem Statement was defined we proceeded to map the gathered information to solve our challenge. We mapped our pains and possible ideas in several blocks to help us visualize which solution was the best at covering the user's pains.

We decided on a viability matrix to analyze the effectiveness and priority of our ideas and discarded the corresponding ones, to finally set up on the most implementable one, which focused on:

1. redesigning the current website

2. creating a physical experience of voting

3. extending/creating new "phygital" touchpoints

Building a high fidelity prototype: physical vote

Web redesign: digital vote

Impact measurement

After improving the current improvement by minor redesigns, both an increase in new users and a decrease in the bounce rate are expected. In addition, this solution will be able to retain users who are currently using the platform as they will see a much clearer, simpler and easier to use the online platform.

On the other hand, implementing of the system of mini communication campaigns as well as the interactive voting experience, Decide Madrid will achieve greater brand awareness and enable users to discover the platform and the citizen's proposals in an intuitive and enjoyable way. Therefore, these proposals will bring great benefits to the Decide Madrid project, which will see its brand image and digital positioning improved.

Design Process

The Double Diamond design method helped us tackle some of the most complex social, economic and environmental problems regarding citizen participation and democratic processes to achieve significant and long-lasting positive change with our final design.

It was by any means a linear process as we kept on learning more about the underlying problems, which sent us back to the beginning.

As learning opportunities, I can highlight the importance of making and testing very early stage ideas to discover new points of view and keep on iterating and improving the product to make sure it meets the user needs.

My role

I worked alongside 4 UX designers with various backgrounds -graphic design, marketing and engineering- which made it easier to delegate within the different stages of the project.

We faced many iterations along the way before implementing the viability matrix that converged into our final design, such as a new communication campaign previous to the web redesign to create expectation.

The main goal in the physical prototype was to create a meaningful experience through a physical interaction between the user and the online platform. We created a high fidelity physical prototype for the user to engage with Decide Madrid in a simple and fun way in order to increase the participation and vote of young citizens.

Each interactive totem incorporates a screen that shows a series of simple steps to formalize the voting of a proposal. Once the user has logged in, a grid appears with the current proposals for the user to vote. When the user chooses, they start to bounce until they register their vote. Once he has chosen one, he has to hop on the platform three times till his vote gets taken in.

This structure may move locations depending on the proposals being voted at the moment and allowing different neighborhoods to experience this new phygital voting system. The grid will show which proposals are the ones getting the most votes.

Our physical prototype enables 3 users to vote at the same time and features a larger scale screen to visualize proposals in real time.

We built an interactive prototype for users to test our concept design and proceeded to iterate.

Decide Madrid

Citizen participatory platform - web redesign and interactive phygital features