Activision

A UX Case Study

Enabling grassroots activisim and community building from the palm of your hands!

THE CHALLENGE

Can we implement a social engagement model to enable citizens to connect with civic representative to improve services and amenities that run their cities ?

Where - Coursework Project at IUPUI

My role - Research Ideation Prototyping Design

Timeline - 1 month

Tools - Figma, MIRO

Sneak peak at the final design solution

Meet the Team

Meet The Team

Anurag Harishchandrakar

Hemit Shah

Gauri Vedak

Salonee Nadkarni

THE PROCESS

Research

Preliminary Research

Qualitative Research

Market Research

Define

Empathy Map

Personas

User Journey

Problem Definition

Ideate

Explore Solutions

Story Boarding

Task flow

Information Architecture

Design

Paper Prototype

UX Design

Wireframes

Visual Design

THE RESEARCH

Preliminary Research - Analysing the competition - Change.org

The area of social activism is kind of a niche. So investigating any existing solutions is a prudent approach. In terms of competing software products. The closest possible product in this category is change.org

Change.org’s Business Model

The business model is designed to promote petitions to influence decision makers at the highest possible form of government. Change.org however, works on an extremely specific business model. At face value, this may give the appearance of being a non profit platform but is not the case.

The initial goal of the platform was to connect people with public interest initiatives and activism programs which resonated with them and allowed them to donate to the actual non profit organizations which did the groundwork towards solving those issues through petitions

How does their petition process work ?

The way change.org works is that you as an individual can submit a petition

free of cost
for zero platform membership fees

Once your petition is reviewed and is deemed worthy by their standards, campaign managers who work for Change.org specializing in marketing and public relations would reach out to you to provide tips and guidance on how your petition can gain traction and momentum in the public sphere.

Where does change.org
succeed?

Easy and assisted process to create a petition

Strong outreach and marketing of validated petitions

Creating a petition is FREE

Citizen
discourse and debate

Change.org bypasses this step by directly allowing users to post their petitions

No Physical or
Virtual Engagement

Users cannot engage and connect via virtual meeting or town halls to discuss and plan their petitions

Improvement and awareness of local governance

Our research indicated citizens lacked general awareness of public services and the organizations that deliver these services.

What do change.org
users miss out on?

Our biggest grip with the platform

Absence of grassroots activism

People in the state of indiana can create a petition concering an issue they have with existing state legislation and anyone from another part of the world can sign that petition

Qualitative Research (Interviews)

For a sensitive subject matter such as this, talking to potential users was quintessential but choosing the right user is just as important.

We decided to interview citizens, here in the city of Indianapolis who have lived here for at least 3-4 years. Due to the nature of the pandemic at the time of research, all interviews were conducted via phone/zoom

Key Discoveries from
Qualitative Research

1

People experience problems due to laws which define how civic services and amenities are executed

2

Those problems are voiced and shared, but only amongst members of the public

3

People don’t know how to voice their concerns to the right people

i.e civic authorities

4

People experience problems due to laws which define how civic services and amenities are executed

5

Those problems are voiced and shared, but only amongst members of the public

Empathy Map

What does the user
SAY

I’m not entirely sure about public activism

What does the user
THINK

I’m not really big on politics,

I’m indifferent to the whole thing

What does the user
DOES

Societal issues are

discussedamong friends

What does the user
FEEL

Unsure how to voice hisopinions

to civic servants

Feels the process might be toocumbersome

Ideate.

Through our research, we know what the pain points and

frustrations of our users are.

Let’s attempt to come up with ideas which can

solve problems which the users experience.

What problems are we trying to
alleviate ?

People don't know how
grassroots democracy operates

Based on our interviews and research, we found that there is a general lack of awareness as how civic amenities keep a city running.

Citizens don't know

Who their elected representatives are
Who works various executive positions that oversee civic service
The organizations within the city that execute public services

Citizens don t know how to voice
their concerns to public officials

The general sentiment is that reaching out to a public official is complicated and a hassle. This is partly due to the opinions or perceptions common citizens hold of bureacratic processes.

Could we establish a line of communication between an elected representative and a citizen which offers practicality, ease of use and serves the purpose of discourse ?

What s the correct way to
voice your opinion ?

Public service and bureacracy is an area frought with an unending pile of paperwork.

Citizens don't know

What the right paperwork is for a process like this
What the correct format and approach is to write a petitio
What the process and logistics is to file a petition

Brainstorming

Having formulated an initial set of problems which users face based on our research. We now needed to engage in the development of a set of viable solutions which would work towards addressing our defined problem statement.

In this pursuit we were able to collate a set of ideas which could work to solve the aforementioned problems. All the ideas were compiled onto a MIRO board

THE SOLUTION

Assist citizens with the knowhow of local governance and help enable change through formal petitions

Social computing model
to enable public discourse

To combat the issue of reluctance or hesitation when it comes

to approaching public officials, a well thought out social computing

model where we involve the right stakeholders is the way to go.

Citizens are well exposed to how social models

work having been exposed to platforms like facebook and instagram.

This would offer a conceptual bridge with a reduced learning curve.

Implementation

Breaking down the Social Computing Model

A product of this nature depends on the interaction paradigms we design into the platform.

If the interaction paradigms fail, it means that our users won t be able to conduct meaningful discourse.

Therefore we must provide the tools to enable this.

4

Submit Petitions

The core feature set of our product was outlined after several rounds of ideation and concept research, wherein the concept of submitting a petition was heavily debated. We realized that by providing this featureset we might have some degree of overlap with somthing like Change.org But our competitor analysis also gave us an opportunity to incorporate distinct differentiators which would allow us to stand out in this niche.

Differentiators and Opportunities

1

Location based petitions

2

Improve awareness about local agencies

Petitioners need to know which govermental agencies to submit their petitions to

3

An opportuntity to engage attorneys

Attorneys are on the constant outlook for clients and engage in pro bono work. Can we loop in attorneys into this network ?

Change.org petitions are open to signatures from anywhere. So can we lock in petitions based on the citizens domicile state ?

1

Posts and Comments

2

Post Feed

3

Upvotes & Downvotes

Could this be a linkedin premium for attorneys?

Attorneys can help citizens with their petition
Perform outreach within the community to improve their visibility as legal professional
Alleviate the negative connotations associated with the legal profession

Design Concept

It’s time to bring our ideas to life . All of the efforts put in for user research , competitor analysis , ideation now must be directed towards achieving a material and interactable UI.

Paper Prototyping

Concept sketches intended to serve

as an early draft for low fidelity

wireframing.

A ton of variations,and introspection

led us to work out patterns which would

serve as a base for the visual design.

Visual Design

Typography

H1 Headline

Welcome to Activision

Rubik-Regular / 22px / #0F0F0F

H2 Headline

Welcome to Activision

Rubik-Regular / 18px / #0F0F0F

H3 Headline

State Government to petition

Rubik-Regular / 14px / #0F0F0F

Paragraph
City buses whilst in great condition are in short supply. If I need a bus to go 8 miles outside the city I might have to pick a route which doesn’t directly take me to my destination and this adds unnecessary stops and wastes time.

Rubik-Regular / 12px / #0F0F0F

Color Pallete

Primary CTA Blue
#1976D2

Secondary Blue
#1976D2

Success
#1976D2-xxxx

Secondary Text
#D0D0D0

Background Color
#FFFFFF

Design Breakdown

Title Description of the social issue. Capped at 180 characters to keep the content brief, concise and easily sharable on twitter

Detailed description of the problem

Multimedia options to embed along with the post

Information section which is automatically updated to enable users of this platform to provide clarity as to the governmental agencies which would have to be petitioned.

This section would be auto generated via recommendations through the description and textual content of the issue at hand.

Create a Post

The home feed acts as a collection point for all launched petitions.

Users can only see petitions posted by people living in the same domicilliary state.

People viewing the posts can comment and share their opinions.

Home Feed

Petition Breakdown

The process of drafting a petition has been broken down into 4 stages

Forum - A common ground for people to discuss and debate issues through comments and upvotes/ downvotes

Townhall - Users can schedule either virtual or inperson meetings to discuss and debate potential change
Poll - Users can post polls to get real quantitative feedback on questions and concerns.
Petition - A step by step introspective process to carefully develop the language and objective of the petition