Running Mate

Inspiration

We wanted to create an app that increases voter turnout, especially for people between the ages of 18-25 whose voter turnout is usually significantly lower. Representing almost half of the voting population, younger generations have an incredible political force that has yet to be utilized to its fullest potential. Our solution is an app that entices users with a familiar swiping interface while providing more clarity on the candidates, voting process, and ballot issues. We found these three aspects can be confusing and difficult, and combined with the overwhelming quantity of information, it can create friction in the voting process. Inspired by the format of dating apps and the urge to create a fun experience, our goal is to educate people, help them with voting registration, and moreover give them the resources and knowledge they need to vote through a familiar, clean, and simple design!

What it does

Users will input their preferences in terms of their political opinions into Running Mate’s questionnaire. From there, users are shown different candidates, choosing between national or state, that have elections coming up for that year. Each candidate’s profile has general information about themselves, signature issues, stances on certain topics, and their social media handles. There’s an option to discover more about the candidate with links to certain news outlets. Users will have an option to either ”match” or “not match” with a candidate after reading more about them. When matched, a percentage will show how much the user’s political views and the candidates match up and will then be given resources on how to register to vote. If users do choose to not match with the candidate, they will be shown another candidate and the information will be presented again. In addition, we also wanted to give users a chance to explore resources if they wanted to research and learn more information themselves. We understand that these candidates are people and their opinions are and can constantly change, so we want to give the opportunity for users to discover their own interests as well.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we faced were mostly aimed at learning new software. While the majority of our team is new to our software, Figma, we are lucky to have an experienced member who was able to guide us through the process. Another challenge was determining what aspects we wanted to include, which we narrowed down to the basics plus a little extra. One last challenge was making sure that we as a team didn’t influence the users to lean towards one political affiliation or another with how we presented information like colors or phrasing of questions. While we understood that users may look for “blue” or “red” candidates we wanted to balance association with subversion.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

I think we are all really proud of the idea and the intuitive interface. It was an interesting experiment tying in a cause we care about with an interface our audience frequents. And as people who are passionate about politics, we noticed ourselves running into the very issue we aim to fix, and as a result we are proud of our efforts to clarify and encourage political engagement with our peers through this different medium.

What’s next

We want to be able to take this app as far as we can, because we think it is a great idea! Some examples on how we aim to do this is by eventually adding more information, how the American voting process and government functions create clearer, more intricate user flows, lightening up the colors so they’re less dark and interactions. In addition, concept validation and full user testing would be needed as we progress further.