Background
Council Data Project is an organization working to make city council meetings more accessible to citizens. In September 2019, they had a functioning platform but no user data to inform the direction of future designs.
My Role
Research Management
Survey Design
UX Design
Visual Design
Usability Testing
“We have an idea of what users want, but we haven’t had time to get out and understand what they need.”
Starting Point
Discovery Research for an Untested MVP
Council Data Project (CDP) is a platform where information about city council meetings, pieces of legislation, and council members is organized into a highly searchable manner. The goal of this project is to make city council information more accessible for average citizens with the hopes of increasing civic engagement at a local level.
I joined the project in September of 2019. At that time, CDP had not conducted any user research and the organizers needed to understand how to roadmap for new features and front-end designs. As a starting point, I recommended conducting a usability study and series of interviews with “average citizens” in order to better understand existing pain points in the platform and potential use cases that may inform future feature development.
Study Design
Simulated Interest-Based Search
Working with two UX designers, I developed a usability test that required users to determine an area of interest and find a meeting in which a bill related to that area of interest was discussed. For example, one user identified environmental activism as their area of interest and determined that they would look for information related to the “green new deal” in Seattle, WA. This design enabled us to get a better under understanding of the manner in which search would be employed for what we considered to be our primary use case, a search for recent legislation related to a user’s specific political or personal interests.
Our goal was to answer the following research questions:
What are the current pain points user experience when looking for specific city council information?
How do users expect the site to function?
What pieces of information are most important to users?
How to users differentiate between search results?
How do users interact with meeting transcripts, videos, and voting records?
What additional information or features need to be included in CDP’s development roadmap?
Key Finding
Users Had Difficulty Differentiating and Identifying the Most Relevant Search Results
“‘City Council 7/22/2019’. I don’t know what that has to do with my search term.”
“I’m a little overwhelmed. I’m seeing a ton of results, but they all look the same.”
“I don’t know. I can’t really tell if any one of these is better than the others or how they’re sorted.”
The largest theme in our usability test results was that users had a very difficult time parsing through their search results. Individual search results weren’t clearly differentiated and users couldn’t see the information they found most important from the initial results view. This led users to be apprehensive about choosing a result to investigate and uncertain about the value of the platform overall.
Key Result
Card-Based Search
In order to address this issue of differentiating results and providing more distinct, high-value information, we decided to explore the possibility of presenting search results as cards.
A card-based design would allow us to present users with more visually distinct options that had a stronger degree of visual hierarchy in their presentation of information. Cards would also enable us to provide users with clear labels for each piece of information they are presented with, which we believed would aid in their overall comprehension of the search results.
Card Design Iterations
The goal of CDP is to offer three distinct search types: meeting search, city council member search, and legislation search. The data collected in our usability test helped identify information users were looking for to validate that a search result was relevant as it related to meeting search specifically. For council member search and legislation search we needed to investigate what information should be included within the cards.
Initially, this was done as a UX team through the lens of determining which information would best help a user differentiate their options. As we progressed, we quickly realized that we needed to engage users in answering this question. Throughout the design process, I was responsible for the legislation card.
Round One: UX Team Ideation
After conducting an internal brainstorming session and reviewing the information that could be pulled into cards with the development team, we determined the content that we would show in each search type card.
The image below depicts three variations designed for legislation cards (then referred to as “bills”). Each is meant to display a different manner of relaying the same information. For example, in Card Two there is a “loading symbol” meant to relay that the bill is in-progress. This same information is stated outright in Card Three and Card One. Card One, however, does not include the last action taken on a given piece of legislation.
Round Two: UX Team Ideation
The first round designs were reviewed by the full CDP team of designers and developers. Each card iteration for meeting, council member, and legislation search was discussed in detail and assessed against similar existing searches to determine what changes should be made to further develop the most effective card designs.
For example, below is the second iteration of the legislation cards. Images were included to potentially contextualize the legislation for users and to conform to the pattern that was emerging for meeting and council member cards which both featured images.
Design Preference Survey
Testing Card Iterations with Users to Define Development Roadmap
At this point we decided that we needed to hear from users to determine how to proceed with each search card design. Using the variations for each card that we’d already designed, I created a survey to collect user preference data and impressions of each.
This survey was initially designed to be sent out to numerous participants through email, social media, and online communities. However, at this time we were preparing to attend a hackathon where we could source participants for in-person interviews. We decided to shift focus and ask the survey questions in a guided experience where we could collect more data than what was input into the survey itself. This way, we could more deeply investigate the reasons for user stated preferences and have a better understanding of how to structure and prioritize content within the search flow.
Key Findings & Key Results
Legislation Card: Less is More in Information and Visuals
Users responded negatively to the images used in the legislation card designs, stating that they did not provide value and did not make it easier to identify the most relevant search results. Of the information included within the cards, users found the least value in the committee name and last action. The committee was deemed unhelpful in discerning relevance and the last action was consistently confused with the status of the legislation. Users also found the legislation summaries difficult to understand without additional context.
To address these concerns we took the following actions:
Removed images to reduce visual noise
Replaced last action and status signifiers with an indicator of the most important date: Next Meeting, Approval, or Rejection
Worked with development to provide additional context via tags reflecting the most common terms in the legislation
The final card design more clearly presents the information users specified as most essential to selecting a piece of legislation to further investigate.
In addition to our search filters, we believe this design will allow users to quickly identify the most relevant response for their search query.
Verify Search Improvement
Card Search Usability Study
Our next step is to conduct a usability study on a prototype of CDP that employs card search for each search type. In doing so, we will be able to compare the results to the initial usability study and learn which areas of search have ultimately been improved. Additionally, we will be able to gather more feedback on how to further refine the card designs and make search usable for the largest number of users.