UX Lead (2020)
Supermajority
With a historic election coming up and wanting to help bring change in American politics, I jumped at the chance to build a destination for women's activism to empower women in the 2020 elections. I joined Five, a Croatia-based agency, to lead the User Experience for Supermajority. The work had been in progress for 3 months and included a dedicated junior designer, but this was the first time a UX Lead was involved. So I got to work doing what I’ve always done best - make order out of chaos.
My work
1
Dove into past research
Having come onto the project following the Discovery phase, I dove into the past research to get to know our the problem space and our target audience.
2
Audited work-in-progress
I combed through all of the work that had been started from design mocks to the newly built pages hosted on internal servers. I documented what needed to be improved so that anyone could track progress using Google Slides and official bug tracking software (Jira).
3
Created project plan
In order to align expectations within the Five team and Supermajority, I created a design project plan that outlined deliverables, roles and timeline for both the internal and client teams.
4
Proposed information architecture
As we dove deeper into requirements and feature work, it became necessary to create an Information Architecture diagram to illustrate how the pages and features would be related within the new website.
5
Illustrated user flows
There was a lot of discussion about what features should be behind the login and what would be openly available. I created user flows in order for the team to clearly see the complexity they were creating for both developers, and ultimately, users.
6
Established best practices
Seeing that the designs for the admin portal were missing best practices or UX patterns for similar enterprise platforms, I quickly learned Figma and jumped in to optimize for the most common user journeys (ex. reading data, filtering content and completing forms).
7
Produced sketches & wires
Throughout the engagement, I used my trusty markers and Five's design tool of choice (Figma) to visualize new ideas.
With the design language already established and the timeline being aggressive, I sketched and made wireframe concepts quickly so that the visual designer could complete the work in the least amount of time.
8
Ran usability studies
Having designed the election features with a few days to spare, I quickly made a plan, wrote the script and moderated 6 usability sessions. As usual, the session were insightful. We iterated based on the findings but were also able to celebrate the wins - people couldn't wait to use the tool we designed to make informed choices during the elections.
9
Gathered new requirements
While my hands-on design work focused on the logged-in experience for Supermajority members, I also collaborated closely with the client to establish requirements, site map, and text copy for the wordpress templates that would comprise the public website. I then partnered with a visual designer to create each of the required templates.
How we did
The team leading this activism work with me was simply inspirational. As a result of our efforts...
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We brought more than $100K in critical donations
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Helped more than 20,000 women establish their voting plan
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Reached 4 million people through direct voter-to-voter outreach using text and calls.
This was my first project after taking time to be home with my kids and during a pandemic lockdown. I wish I had more opportunity to get to know my target audience before jumping into solutions and I wish I had gotten to know my teammates in Croatia more. However, I am proud of what we accomplished and look forward to learning and growing as we all should following the completion of a big milestone.
