CALmatters

🫡 role: Design Lead I operated as a consultant, working with stakeholders, understanding goals and delivering UX and designs that could be handed off to internal development.

Overview

• CALmatters approached me for a custom design and experience for their 2018 Election Guide.

  

  An editorial feeling, playful looking Election Guide website - scroll to view

  The experience needed to both preserve the editorial essence of CALmatters while also realizing a delightful, engaging and most importantly, informative resource for the upcoming election in 2018.

  With a limited budget, I worked with the client stakeholders to clearly outline what would be successful. They had development resources and of course a robust content and news team, leaving only a design style and a flexible information Architecture to facilitate.

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  Examples of hand-drawn, rapid prototyping to move quickly

Key views

The landing page

• The landing page featured tons of information and resources around the upcoming election. The most important priority was both the Govenors race and a video guide on how to vote.

  

  The landing view of the 2018 CALmatters election guide

  Aside from the Information Architecture, I worked with CALmatters and developed an engaing design style that was both clean and fun, leaning into their overarching theme of supporting decision making with their readers.

  The next section or priority beyond the Govenors race was helping readers understand the key issues at stake during the election, shown here as jump-off points for detailed explanations available in subsequent pages about how the election impacted each of them.

• Election Countdown

  Continuing down the lading page, the next critical section a user would encounter was a calendar view of important events leading up to the election.

  Users could conveniently connect the events to their calendars or simply take note of the highlighted, upcoming important event.

  

  A Calendar of upcoming events related to the election.

• Informative Data and trending election news

  In continuing with CALmatters desire to provide an informative resource, following upcoming events was featured polling and campaign finance data.

  

  True to what CALmatters is known for, news articles and election related topics rounded out the landing page. This section was searchable and offered a means to subscribe for continued engagement.

Ballot and Race Resources in detail

• Ballots & Races

  As readers engaged with key issues or ballots, they'd find more detailed information, data visualizations and information about which candidates supported certain measures.

  

  Ballots and Key Issue detailed views

• Govenors Race

  One of the more important portions of the interactive election guide was a breakdown of the California Governor candidates. Working with CALmatters, we envisioned a format mirroring job applicants and a job description of holding the Govenors office.

  To continue fostering engagement from readers, I suggested activities like Candidate Matching and Candidate Comparisons.

  

• Race Details

  Digging deeper, readers could find detailed information about each candidate and their positions on key issues and ballot measures - and details about where and within what precincts races were being held.

  

  Detailed candidate views

  Here, readers could also find selected interviews and videos featuring each candidate.