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Miguel Jose Divo Gonzalez

User Experience and Service Design MA

I strive to leverage off my computing background, and with my creative skills I'm able to bounce between analytical and design mindsets. This allows me to be flexible in my design process and intricate in the details of my solution.

Vote Confidently

Be Informed, Receive Guidance, Feel Connected

Project Background

Young adults in the UK face underrepresentation at elections due to a multitude of reasons; a lack of participation, engagement and trust towards the government.

This has recently been at an all-time low as over 70% of the youth believe it’s not worth voting at all, despite this, they all feel inspired to act online. So how do we empower them to take that behaviour to the polls?

User Research

The Discover & Define research stage was conducted to gain greater understanding and empathise with young adults to understand their attitudes, behaviours and feelings towards politics and their political engagement.

This included conducting contextual interviews and card sorting activities with young adults of different political engagement levels to understand their current attitudes towards politics. Auto-ethnographic studies were utilised to understand the current governmental systems that allow the youth to advocate their concerns.

Key Insights

The result of this data was based on the Politically Powerless archetype who are young adults interested in politics but discouraged to engage in taking action.

This is caused by a lack of confidence, struggle with information access, a desire for supportive communities and an importance on feedback and transparency.

Development Process

The Develop & Deliver stage is an iterative process, operating through relaying feedback from participants and allowing emerging data to path the next steps.

This involved 8 participants and has three key iterations which allowed my project’s scope to pivot toward a desirable solution for the target user group.

Behavioural Change

In order to empower the youth to go vote, they need to shift their current behaviour. So as to achieve this, my project utilises behavioural change strategies.

As they already have a positive attitude towards wanting to be informed, my aim is to create a new social norm which pressures them into using this service, whilst giving them a high sense of control.

Final Outcome

Vote Confidently focuses on informing, supporting and connecting young adults by offering unbiased, reliable information and trustworthy interaction to become better informed voters. The main roles of Vote Confidently is to:

My goal is to make these politically powerless young adults feel heard by empowering them through informed engagement, and to be confident to take action on what is most important to them.

Ideation

After going through several rounds of ineffective ideation sessions, I ultimately chose the Silent Round Robin method, as it encourages conceptual thinking based on my UX vision, fosters diverse viewpoints by mixing participants with various political engagement levels, and promotes active listening to collaborate on ideas.

This allowed me to form concepts based on the overarching ideas discussed by the participants.

Prototyping

I used matrices to narrow down my focus. The results manifested with the ‘expert advisor’ and ‘how-to guide’ concepts due to their potential impact in guiding users through behavioural change.

My prototypes consisted of testing the effectiveness in addressing the user’s needs and to investigate whether the concepts are desirable to the user.

Co-Design Session

The co-design session was done with two types of participants to gather diverse ideas from different engagement levels. I aimed to understand the advisor’s role, balance individualism with a sense of community, and encourage users to passively learn about their priorities.

This allowed me to make data driven decisions to form, prioritise, and select the features of my solution based on their relevance to my design principles, ensuring they address behavioural change and the user needs.

How It Works

Vote Confidently works by analysing user data, along with various APIs and software, to provide a curated feed. We ensure ethical compliance and transparency through third-party certification.

With the rise in young voters, we aim to gain government recognition to reinforce the app’s role in fostering informed engagement.

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