RESEARCH

Stakeholder Interviews

The team was aware that there was a lot for us to learn about the voting process in Michigan, both from the bureaucratic side and the voter's side. To get a firmer grasp of the problem, we began interviewing city and township clerks about their local voting processes.

Fun fact: Michigan is the only state in the U.S. whose voting is administered on a city and township level. Most other states in the U.S. administer voting on a county level. This means Michigan makes up about 25% of the entire country's voting entities with its 1,500+ cities and townships running elections.

What we wanted to know from city and township clerks:

1. What are clerks' pain points or frustrations surrounding the absentee voting process during the pandemic?
2. How did they respond to those frustrations?
3. What sort of interactions do they have with voters, including college students?

After forming our research questions I created an interview protocol ↗ that we could follow when conducting the interviews with clerks. After each interview we transcribed the conversation. Myself and another team member worked on an affinity diagram to discover common insights among the clerks.

Upon completing our affinity analysis, we came across several helpful insights that influenced the rest of our work on the project:

1. Most clerks think that the absentee voting method benefits voters.
2. However, due to the pandemic and the Michigan prop 3 change, clerks were concerned that a surge in absentee ballot processing would increase an already heavy workload.
3. Clerks faced numerous challenges hiring poll workers in their precincts, largely due to social distancing guidelines and limitations.
4. Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, much of the clerks' time was spent taking calls and responding to emails regarding questions about absentee voting.
5. Clerks all had unique methods for informing the public about absentee voting in their city or township. These methods included creating informational videos, using social media channels to interact with voters (YouTube, facebook forums, etc.) and some even held in-person lectures.

IDEATION

Exploring the Problem Space

While researching college students, we noticed that community college students had fewer resources available to them compared to students at a four year university. Furthermore, we saw that not only do community college students have a much lower voter turnout rate than their university counterparts, but they tend to be more passive about seeking voter information. We decided that it would be wise to design a solution for this population that we saw as underserved. We narrowed down our target audience as community college students between the ages of 18 and 25, which aligned with our client's goal of designing for harder-to-reach younger voters.

At this point, I thought it would be wise to generate a wide array of ideas based on the information we gathered. Using the rapid ideation method, I facilitated an open-ended design brainstorm session with two other group mates to quickly generate ideas.

We arrived at four solutions to consider:

1. A volunteer voter hotline/chat
2. A guide to the website mi.gov/vote
3. A compendium of voter resources that has been vetted for reliability and accuracy of information
4. A tool to help community college students sign up to count ballots or work at precincts

We arrived at these four solutions because 1) we believed that they could be prototyped by the end of our program and 2) we believed that they were realistic solutions given the limited resources we were working with.

DESIGN

Refining Our Problem Statement and Participatory Design

Once we narrowed our scope to community college students, we wanted to learn about their absentee voting experience and knowledge in more detail. We reached out to community partners involved in community college student recruitment and designed a survey to send to student bodies at various different community colleges in Southeast Michigan. To our surprise, we were unable to successfully send out our survey. Administrators of the community colleges we reached out to were uninterested in sending our survey to their students without an IRB approval.

Because our team only had a few weeks left before our project deadline, we decided to adjust our target audience to university students between ages 18 and 25 who are eligible to vote. We refined our problem statement once again and landed on:

“How might we leverage information from existing trustworthy platforms to help college students answer questions around absentee voting and help them successfully submit the ballot?”

From the beginning of the project, our team's intention was to involve the community for which we were designing in the design process. In order to co-design with our target audience, we put together a participatory design protocol ↗ for virtual PD sessions. Our research questions for the virtual PD sessions were as follows:

• What are college students’ perceptions about voting absentee?
• What is their main confusion about the process?
• Where do they go when they have questions about absentee voting?
• What do they think about our design concepts?

Additionally, after more conversations and considerations about our original solutions, we altered some of our solutions and wanted to find out what our PD session participants thought of them. The solutions we presented to our participants were:

1. A voter hotline for answering student voters' questions
2. A chat box built into the MDOS website
3. A student voter guide available on MDOS's website and elsewhere (e.g. social media)
4. An SMS service texting confirmation of updates throughout the absentee voting process

We decided that tapping into our network was the best way to ensure a relatively high response rate. We emailed the UMSI listserv to recruit participants. Another teammate and I conducted the participatory design sessions together.