Humanising voter registration for local councils.
Registering to vote. It should be easy. Accessible. Everyone should be able to do it.
Nay, everyone should want to do it.
It’s the first step to being able to vote in local and parliamentary elections. But year-on-year, younger people and first time voters (AKA attainers) in the UK are less likely to be on the electoral register than older people.
Personal Service Design project as part of IDEO U’s
Human-Centered Service Design course.
April 2021
How might we make the voter registration process for local elections simple enough that first time voters/young adults in the community want to do it?
The Role
Creating impact and long-term value by meeting service customers’ needs.
Better understand the interactions people have with the service and surface problem areas and opportunities through user journey maps.
Choosing the most impactful and high value moments to design.
Prototyping service ideas with low-fidelity roleplaying for quick learnings and decision making to pivot/persevere.
The Challenge
In 2018, only 25% of attainers were registered to vote — compared to 45% in 2015. The UK Electoral Committee cited “being younger, recent home movement and whether someone rents their home from a private landlord” as factors contributing to lower registration rates in 2018.
My own experience with voter registration for the 2021 London Mayoral Elections was disjointed and confusing. I felt strongly that if I could be able to actually speak to someone, this process would be much simpler.
As part of the coursework for IDEO U’s Human Centered Service Design course, I set out to redesign the experience of registering to vote by reintroducing the human element.
The Outcome
The humble post office.
Not the most exciting or sexiest of places, but you go there when you need to return a parcel or buy a stamp. Maybe even use one of the government authorised services like renewing your passport or driving license. It’s accessible to most people most of the time, keeps regular business hours, and if you live in an area with a postcode, there is a post office near you.
So why not go to the post office to register to vote?
This was the scenario that I prototyped and storyboarded (please excuse the stickmen).
Considering the elements required to pull this off, I constructed a service blueprint to incorporate the people, space, technology, and internal processes that need to work together to complete the story. Essentially, bringing all the interacting pieces together.
Service blueprint: bringing everything together
If I had the resources and the network, I’d love to have interviewed and spoken to someone from my local council who is directly involved with processing applications to the Electoral Roll.
I’d want to understand the process from their point of view, what the timeline looks like from their SLA, which parts of their journey do they find painful?
Which parts do they enjoy?
How would they do it differently?
And most importantly — would my idea work?
The Process
01. Mapping out the ‘As-Is’ process
To begin with, I mapped out the existing user journey and made note of the moments, emotions, and any other factors in the journey that made the experience painful or gainful.
I took the time to study others’ experiences throughout this process and their reactions to gain as much input as possible to the existing journey — and to understand whether others experienced the same pain points I faced.
Considering the data published by the UK House of Commons and Electoral Commission, the persona I chose to study and redesign the service for was a young person in the UK who lives in a metropolitan city who is interested in voting in local government elections.
02. User interviews to gain insights
I conducted multiple user interviews with a variety of people from different backgrounds and age groups to understand their exposure to political activity, why (or why not) they choose to vote in elections, and what factors influenced when, how, and where they register to vote. This input was essential to define the persona(s) I was designing for— and ultimately decide which part of the user journey I wanted to re-design.
Deciding between the path of least resistance and the path with the potential to unlock the most value went down to how best the service design would serve the problem statement: How might we make the voter registration process for local elections simple enough that first time voters/young adults in the community want to do it?
03. Structured brainstorming
Though brainstorming is a a fluid process, it often helps to provide structure by using prompts to get the creatives juices flowing. I employed the following prompts in my brain storming process:
Sacrificial concepts: Ideas that are deliberately sacrificed because they just won’t work - they’re meant to be wild, raw, and push to the edges. What is the wildest, craziest way to deliver this service?
Extreme prompts: A prompt to brainstorm moments that aren’t inherently unique, or have been part of the journey for some time, e.g. what’s the slowest/fastest way that we could deliver this moment? What’s the most dangerous, or absurd? What could we do if we only had $10? $10,000,000?
Constraints: What would this moment be like if it were all digital? What about if it were only done in person? Or over the phone? What if we removed certain elements of the space?
04. Storyboarding & prototyping the service
I decided to prototype the idea for a voter registration service at the post office with the idea of increasing visibility — and therefore awareness — of the service.
The idea behind it is that post offices are widely available anywhere that has a valid post code, is (or at least, should be) accessible to everyone in society, and are already utilised by young adults like my chosen persona.
I even roped in a friend to help me prototype the service through roleplaying and discovered some moments in my prototype I hadn’t anticipated, i.e. the fact that not everyone may have their National Insurance number to hand at all times.