Building a local legislation tracker, increasing civic engagment across 20+ counties

Role

UX Design & Research

Timeline

Feb - March 2022

Team

Lead designer and research working with product manager and developer

Context

I designed a bill tracker that allows residents to see where local legislation stands

In today's digital landscape, users are engulfed in a sea of information, and this makes it difficult to navigate questions about what’s going in their own neighborhoods.

Council Data Project is an open-source software that aims to bridge the gap between local communities and their government by providing transparency into local government meetings via transcripts, voting records and now with legislation life cycle tracking.

Council Data Project’s homepage

problem

Local legislation is hard to access due to workday meetings, poor online resources, and complex processes

A recent survey by the National Research Center (NRC) in over 200 communities found that only 25% of Americans attended a public meeting in the past year, and just 19% contacted their local officials.

75% of Americans will never attend a public meeting with their city council for the year - The Governing

Attending public meetings during a busy workweek is rarely a priority, yet these meetings often contain key legislative information. As a result, local residents miss out on crucial details. A simple solution might be to record and share these meetings online. Let’s examine our current options for accessing this information.

Current websites with information on these meetings can be incredibly hard to navigate due to poor UX considerations. They are also often riddled with an abundance of information, inspiring a cognitive overload that deprives users of the information they were actually looking for.

An overview of the lengthy, complicated legislative process

Perhaps the most offensive reason that understanding where legislation currently stands is due to the lengthy and overly complicated process it takes to pass (or not pass) these bills. The image above shows the first page of a transcript explaining the bill-passing process, a complete snooze-fest that loses the reader by the second sentence.

Loads of information can be difficult to parse

Where do I look?

process

People are looking to understand the basics when it comes to legislation

At this point our research we’ve learned that legislation is inaccessible for a variety of reasons. We’ll work on that. But now it was time to focus on what people are actually curious about when it comes to legislation. I interviewed people across three user groups CDP served–local residents, activists, and journalists in Seattle.

I conducted 1:1 remote interviews on Zoom to understand what users were actually interested in

Through interviewing, I found three questions people across all three groups wanted answered.

  • What is the legislation about?

  • What stage of the law making process is it in?

  • What do the votes look like currently?

With a better idea of what people are looking for, started designing low fidelity ideas to gather feedback quickly.

How might we search for legislation?

What information about a bill do people want to see?

The team is confident in the bill search functionality but had some feedback regarding the bill view page. Specifically, they suggested further emphasizing the votes and removing any items that involve data we don’t have access to.

We wanted to address the feedback whilst moving designs to higher fidelity as we got closer to our goal for launch. Here’s a refreshed look at the bill view that addresses stakeholder feedback.

Walking through a bill that was rejected by a local committee

solution

Final Designs

impact

Availability in 23 counties and counting

This work has directly provided journalists, activists and all members of each community across 20 counties a way to stay informed on municipal council meetings and actions.

It has also allowed for querying of full voting records across thousands of bills and ordinances, helping members keep their council members accountable.

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