The Breakdown!
A three-week agile design sprint to make government spending understandable!
“Nothing is certain except death and taxes,” Benjamin Franklin. We all pay taxes…but where does the money go? At first I thought I knew the answer but the more I did I realized I don’t know where the money is directly going. Government spending is a complex maze broken up by federal and state spending. I wasn't alone in feeling confused and overwhelmed by the mass amount of information and lack of guidance. So my team and I took on the beast of making government spending more understandable and informative for the common person! I took on the role of project manager, Alicia Gibson was our research lead, and Cody Veidelis was our interaction lead!
Research and Discovery
We started with by creating a screener survey. Our screener survey reached 72 people which was just short of our goal of 75, but we were satisfied with the amount of reposncies non the less! From here we were able to conduct interviews with 21 individuals. The intervieweesranged from ages 20–34, and all of them paid taxes. We asked questions such as,
“On a scale of 1–10 how much do you know about federal spending?”
“Where have you seen complex information presented in an easy to understand way?”
“If you had this knowledge on government spending what would you do with it?”
After conducting the interviews our team came together to break apart and synthesize thedata. We started by creating an affinity map.
As seen above there were three main themes in the affinity map. Complex info, voting, and information. Users strongly expressed that they want to be able to understand the complex government information. This would be best done through “graphs”, “piecharts” and other visual aids. Many users expressed that with this new knowledge they would become a more informed citizen. This will allow them to choose their political candidates better. Users want to ensuring that their candidate is funding programs that are important to the individual.
With this wealth of user insights, our team was then able to create a user persona. We honed in on the milenial demographic. These are people who care about government funding and want to ensure their community is being taken care of properly. They want to trust and know they are making the correct decisions with who they elect. But, their pain point is that 1. government information is way too complex and confusing for the common person to understand, and 2. they don’t have time to do their own research. The user islooking for an easy simplified way to find this information on government spending.
Development and Design
Our team started creating user flows and sketches. We had one main goal. We NEEDED to simplify complex information. We had to satisfy the need our users had of wanting to understand and feel informed. We also wanted to find a way to incorporate the voting and political aspect we picked up from our users.
We started with created flows on Miro. Above is a flow showing how the user would interact with the website to find information on state or federal spending. The flow also incorporates the glossary feature our team decided to add to the site. This feature will help users find definitions of words they are not familiar with. Our team found this feature crucial since the lack of government vocabulary came up as a common user concern.
After creating flows we started designing. From sketches to a fully clickable prototype in Axure. Our team used a design studios to come together and create a common design theme.
We also created a style guide to help keep or design consistent and clean throughout the whole prototype.
Final Axure Prototype
We finalized the Breakdown! The Breakdown is a website that allows users to access information on a federal or state level. When users select their state they then have the option to look at their current state representatives and how they are allocating their money. The site also has a call to action to register to vote, and other voting resources.
This project reminded us to design for the user and their needs not ourselves! We constantly tracked back to our data and stayed as aligned with what the users needed.
Thank you for taking the time to read my case study! I’d love to connect with you over LinkedIn!