My role
I was responsible, alongside Mika Santos, for the entire project process (from research to the creation of the interface and testing), with the participation of Juliana Cirino, Pedro Tavares, and Antônio Messias.
Through a desk research, we seeked to answer the initial questions that arose in our minds and better understand the topic itself.
Civic participation is a right provided for by law and in the constitution. But only 6% of people believe that exercising democracy through direct participation, beyond voting, is effective. This stems from a history of corruption and lack of social return in the country.
(PUC-RS, 2020)
Various research studies prove and measure that participation is something positive for the population in general, brings a sense of belonging and an educational process regarding politics, and that having mere contact with it already awakens interest and motivation.
(UFBA, 2010)
From the perspective of public management, the means of participation (with the main ones being consultations, councils, and ombudsmen) generate a very high demand and there is a lack of means to systematize this into information that can be consumed by managers. There are also insufficient means to present the results to the population.
(Sectoral Dialogues EU-Brazil, 2012)
The expansion of access to technology has increased the population's interest in the pursuit of rights and improvements, and the internet is indeed effective as an enhancement in participation, with examples from Brazil and around the world - the strongest being those of Participatory Budgeting.
(Pólis Institute, 2011)
However, the participation of people in online polls, forums, voting, and public consultations is still low.
(UFERSA, 2020)
We conducted a benchmarking of 8 platforms that deal with political participation in Brazil, and all had at least one of these problems:
Be just a means of consulting information, and not of participation;
Don't say too much to someone who doesn't understand bureaucratic matters;
Do not deal with real projects, but with proposals from the population;
Be paid and directed to companies.
This became the X of the matter when we realized that we could take two different paths: one, focused on the people who work in public management; and another, focused on the citizenry.
We made a decision focused on participation itself.
In order to address this issue, we extended some research for the CSD Matrix, defining the main certainties, and of all the assumptions and doubts raised, here we highlight only those that we moved forward for validation using the Relational Map:
In analyzing the user research, we identified macro themes at each stage, which transformed throughout this discovery process, and served as a basis for elaborating the Top Insights:
50%
and of them, only 5% consider themselves actively engaged today.
Of those who have never participated, 19.5% would like to participate.
31%
In other words, only 31% of people really have no interest in political issues.
89.1%
feel some demotivation. Lack of time, disbelief, and complexity are the main factors.
48%
people seek political information.
News and television portals follow.
62.3%
of the people who have already participated have used some government portal or app to get informed about.
78%
These people liked the experience, invalidating one of our assumptions.
37.5%
does not accompany any political management.
24%
these people claim to seek political information, which demonstrates engagement in other ways.
48%
feels that no management takes into account citizen participation.
From the analysis of the questionnaire, this understanding arose. The consumption of information is the point where participation begins, and the importance of education had already been validated in the Desk Research.
We began to consider this when talking to people in the qualitative research, seeking to identify what political participation means to people, in order to validate this hypothesis as well.
"I often feel that feeling when it comes close to some political context I get involved in the subject, but I don’t dive deep, you know?"
"I think that the phone is more in the palm of your hand in everyday life and you end up there scrolling through your feeds taking a look and following along."
“I don't know about that, but I've never researched much, so maybe it's my fault.”
"I don’t usually ask people because they generally lead us to a type of thinking, right?"
“I choose my vote thinking about what I believe and what benefits me and the people around me”
"I think my disinterest is more due to the dialogue because I think that the dialogue has become very complicated, you know? Because it has become so heated, you know?"
"Today I am not participating in anything, but I have already participated in demonstrations, meetings, and things like that. I really enjoyed having participated."
We crossed all the information collected:
Desk Research + Questionnaire + Interviews
to summarize the most relevant learnings for building a Persona and defining a problem.
This step caused rework!
When we were further along in the project, we had to go back to this point and redo it. This made all the difference later on, especially in the clarity of the Value Proposition.
Isa is 28 years old and has lived in Salvador since she was little.
She has a strong sense of responsibility and social justice.
Works as an Administrative Assistant, studies Nursing, and lives with her mother, sharing the household care and expenses.
Works during the day and studies at night, which is why prefers to consume information quickly and objectively through social networks.
Isa dreams of achieving a more dignified life and believes that through nursing she can embrace her social sense.
Empathizing with Isa and focusing on her pains and needs, we were able to elaborate the Problem Statement:
Isabela needs to have access to summarized political information, secure and peaceful discussions, and quick and efficient means of participation to feel more confident and belonging as a citizen.
Building an empathy map for Isa and a Value Proposition Canvas, clearer ideas emerged about what we needed to solve and how we could do that. Remembering that it should be through a digital product that had value for Isa in her daily life.
Even though we are in the definition phase, we needed some exercise of expansion to explore ways to materialize this value proposal. We did the exercise "How could we?", and organized the ideas generated by answering these questions using the MoSCoW Matrix, which has 4 regions: "Must have", "Should have", "Could have", and "Won't have". Here, for reasons of synthesis and the very idea of prioritization, we present only the ideas that would cause the product to lose value and meaning if they were not included.
With these two exercises, it became very clear which product we would build as a solution to Isabela's problem.
Facilitating access to political participation would be the differentiator of Vozzz as a social network.
How could we...
It has to be!
We did the Crazy 8s, a creative activity where each team member produced various quick sketches developing ideas on how to turn feature ideas into usable interfaces.
As many ideas emerged, these sketches are still in the definition phase, and not in development, as we still need to go through another prioritization process after this. These sketched ideas were filtered through an Impact X Effort Matrix, which has 4 regions: "Not a priority", "If we have time, we will do it", "We need to analyze", and "We will do it". Below, I show only the screens we prioritized to work on and that were incorporated into the final prototype.
Our User Flow was well detailed, with many tasks. We realized how complex the product we were creating was, and how it would have many features, which could make our work difficult going forward. But we continued, as after reviewing a lot, we had no doubts that we were aligned with Isa's pain points and needs.
We sought to map mainly the flows that would lead the user’s network to interact with the political participation tools. This gave us essential clarity to understand what should be present on each screen and how to organize the information logically and intuitively.
Below, a basic site map of the defined information architecture.
We created some low-fidelity wireframes and a major misunderstanding led us to decide to move quickly to medium fidelity. This choice allowed us to give a more solid structure to the product, as well as accelerate our learning in using Figma with components and autolayout, which greatly sped up the work.
We conducted another Benchmarking to learn about the visual and interaction structure of the social networks that made the most sense to the interviewed people: Instagram and Twitter.
Our goal was to provide a familiar and comfortable experience for users, so they felt in a known environment.
Swipe to see the screens:
Low fidelity
Medium fidelity
The first decision of the Style Guide was to work with 3 colors, to convey the diversity that exists and should exist, of opinions, cultures, and contexts in Brazil.
We chose the name “Vozzz” with the intention of conveying a new way to talk about politics, renewing how people see themselves participating actively.
The progressive logo represents the voice echoing, freeing opinions, and symbolizing the awakening to civic participation.
May politics be a natural part of everyone's daily life.
In onboarding, we talk about recognizing the speaker's place as a right because civic participation is a right.
With Jakob's Law in mind, we replicate patterns from other established social media interfaces to organize what is new in our information architecture.
4 people participated in the test, which was conducted using the Maze tool.
Overall, people were positively surprised by the possibility of having a tool with this purpose. The words "intuitive" and "fluid" were frequently used and we were very happy with the result!
Mission 1: Registration in the app
This mission was practically without difficulties, we just concluded that the spacing of the touch area of the inputs should be a little larger. This difficulty is represented in the first two screens of the heat test below.
Mission 2: To sign a Bill
Here there were two difficulties:
One was finding the participation section where this bill was located on the Home screen, so it would be something necessary for us to review. The third screen of the heat test represents this.
The other difficulty was that after being redirected to the government website, they had trouble finding the button to click and actually sign the bill, and we discussed how this would be outside of our control, as it is an action that needs to be taken outside of our app, however, we could come up with ways to mitigate this within our interface.
With more time, in addition to this issue of redirection, what I consider more important would be to redo some components, especially the feed posts and the label bars (increasing the touch area and simplifying the options), and I would conduct another more extensive usability test. In it, we should measure some key outcome metrics, such as completion time and success rate of participation and posting tasks. This work is ongoing today.
With the development of the application, to ensure and monitor the expected business results from the federal government (which would be the increase in the number of people in participatory actions; and data on behavior, interests, and political opinions of the user individuals, which would depend on the retention of active users) the following key performance indicators should be monitored:
percentage of users by completed participations;
viral coefficient;
retention rate;
click-through rate per user;
time on screen.
New insights from the usability test:
We can see based on the usability test that the solution to the main pain point, which was the weight of conflicting dialogues about politics, was well addressed with the social networking features of Vozzz. We still need to test and iterate ways to better mediate and alleviate the issues related to redirecting participatory actions to external pages (such as those of the government) through our interface.
