Designing an online portal for Filipino Voter’s Registration

Overview 🔎

As the 2022 Presidential Elections are coming up, I realized that there is a huge lack of resources for eligible voters. First-time and long-time voters don’t exactly know where they can refer to for any information about voter registration, activation, and even their own voting precincts. Mostly word-of-mouth and outdated Wordpress websites seem to be the main source of information.

As part of our case study, my friend Bea and I decided to pursue this as part of our UX design studies. As voters ourselves, we wanted to help first-time and long-time voters by creating a reliable source of information in the form of a website.

Problem & Solution 🤝

There were a handful of things my partner and I needed to figure out before we could design. We wanted to: • To validate our assumptions about the different types of Filipino voters. • To find out the major pain points of the registration process. • To find out what the current COMELEC resources are lacking.

Process 🛣

Our design process involved the following steps

Conduct User and Expert Reviews

Evaluate existing COMELEC resources and solutions

Create affinity maps, insight statements, and HMW questions

Create personas, user journeys, and job stories

Design user flow

Create Lo-Fi wireframes

Prototyping

Usability Testing

Hi-Fi Designs

Results 🎁

We conducted two types of research

User Interviews - we spoke to first-time voters, location changers, and people who were registering as a voter for the first time

Expert Interviews - the only expert we got to talk to was involved in the 2016 elections, under the DICT

Analogous Solutions - we looked at existing designs that we thought would be relevant to our designs (i.e. Airbnb, Grab, booking a plane ticket, etc.)

Based on our research, here are our key insights

Filipinos are not sure where to look for credible information when it comes to voter’s registration.

There is no proper, standardized feedback system from registration to reactivation to voting.

Due to COVID-19 processes such as contact tracing and transferring money, QR codes have become an everyday practice.

Takeaways 📣

We conducted this study over the course of a few months. Though this was a case study, this was heavily motivated by real world events (at the time) - the2022 Presidential Elections. Here’s what I learned.

For a project as big as this, you need to interview as many people from as many backgrounds as possible. This was the biggest limitation of our study, as we started this during the pandemic, when cases were high.

There needs to be a huge redesign of how government services are done. Online efforts can only do so much. Offline or service designs should also receive an overhaul.

It is the government’s responsibility to make sure that all of the information needed is readily available. Use aspiring designers can only do so much.

Information, after all, is key. Every Filipino has the right to accurate and correct information, especially when it comes to something as significant as voting for the next president.