Designing US Election Tools
Timeline: Nov 2020 | Visit link
Description: I was part of the effort to track the 2020 US elections. The Guardian had a distributed team, and I worked with Alvin Chang in the US and Ashley Kirk, Sean Clarke, Helena Robertson, and others in the UK to implement the package of stories. This included interactive web pages, illustrations, and promotional materials.
Technical summary:
Helped design and implement visual theme for election-related content
Designed a bulletin-board like results experience
Helped design and implement visual theme
I worked on 2020 election visual elements for web pages and promotion materials.
The design team was led by Ben Longden, and this work was more so exercising my technical skills in implementing someone else’s vision that me executing my own.
I personally believe that news design incorporates quite a lot of UX thinking. Because millions of page views were on the line, our team conducted user research, went through design sprints, and practiced many UX design principles.
Election “Bulletin-Board”
I was the head designer of the experience for the Democratic Primaries. I designed the experience, and worked with Niko Kommenda and Ashley Kirk to implement the designs.
My main mission was to create a way to inform readers of the state of the primaries. This was challenging for a few reasons: to start, there was a large number of candidates. There were many contexts in which we would need this element, so it needed to be adaptable and responsive. Finally, it was a lot of information to look at at once.
I eventually came up with the idea of a ‘bulletin board’. This bulletin board would be made of ‘block elements’, and these block elements were designed modularly so they could fit different contexts .
These ‘blocks’ were meant to be viewed independently, or within the context of others. This made it easy for the customers to recognize.
It was imperative that the blocks were responsive. It starts to become a fun exercise seeing the different combinations of blocks and how they may stack.
