How we bring you BallotReady

BallotReady’s tools help people vote informed. Users enter their address and can see their polling place, vote by mail rules, voter registration process, who’s on their ballot, information about those candidates, and more.

The United States is large and diverse, and election law and how those rules are presented vary across the country. In order for us to share it with users in a consistent and coherent way, we need to collect and process it. All the information you see on BallotReady is painstakingly gathered by an army of meticulous researchers. They review secretary of state and election commission websites. They call county clerk offices. They receive faxes of sample ballots. It’s a truly monumental feat.

Leveling up

Over the years we’ve honed our processes. We know just who to call. We know which counties have spiffy election websites with all the information in one place, and we know which cities need us to call a clerk to get a document faxed over. We know what kind of information is consistent across every ballot and where things vary state to state or county to county. We know all the edge cases and all the exceptions.

In the past, we’ve managed entering and processing this data through a complex system of spreadsheets, plugins, SQL, and moxie.

But this year, we’re leveling up. This week, we’ve launched our shiny new set of custom internal tools to manage our candidate research process. These tools were built with a few goals in mind:

A better experience for our researchers - Simpler onboarding, more direction built right into the tool, more visually appealing .
Less work for our research project managers - Eliminate time-intensive manual QA and checking for duplicates. No more complex data uploading processes. More time for supporting researchers, managing deadlines, and improving processes.
A more predictable, consistent intake of data for our database and engineering teams - Information should be entered and processed the same way every time, so all of our tools can instantly make use of the data, without manual intervention.
A better experience for our users - High quality, accurate information on even earlier timelines, so users can start their ballot research sooner.

The overall goal: high quality data, delivered to users sooner, while improving the experience of our team members.

Our approach

We use a few best practice approaches to building all of our tools - user-facing and internal-facing:

Human-centered design: We put the experience of our stakeholders at the center of everything we build.
Balanced teams: Teams work best when they learn, design, build, and iterate together. That means product, design, and engineering team members were involved in every stage of the process. We also included our research team members as part of our balanced team to make sure we were truly building alongside our stakeholders.

Lean: We do things in order to learn and improve and we make decisions based on things we learn from real people.

Agile: Our team planned for, sought, and welcomed feedback and change throughout the design and build process. We aimed for maximum adaptability, collaboration, and transparency.

A preview of our backend upcoming elections data

The design process

Discover and Empathize

We started by talking to our researchers and research project managers. We observed them using the old research processes and asked them to describe everything they were doing and why they were doing it. We asked clarifying questions when we saw things we didn’t understand. We asked how it felt to do those processes, uncovering which parts were fun or frustrating or annoying or boring or stressful.

Synthesize

We documented the processes through story maps, flow charts, and writeups. We tried to separate what needed to get done from the way that it was currently being done, in order to really capture what a tool should do, while leaving ourselves free to imagine a totally new way to do it.

Ideate and Prototype

We looked at a few different ways that we could design solutions that would solve our problems of data entry and processing. We drew up multiple versions of wireframes, versions that included some features and excluded others. Our engineering team looked at different ways to organize the information once it was entered.

Evaluate and Refine

We worked over wireframes with our research team updating and refining them until we felt confident enough to build.

Then we got to building, while continuing to gather feedback, synthesize our learnings, ideate solutions, evaluate outcomes and refine again.

This process might look fairly linear, but it’s really cycles on cycles on cycles. We worked closely together across teams throughout the process to constantly ideate and prototype, then evaluate and refine, then get our changes back in front of our stakeholders to do more discovery, followed by more synthesis and a new round of ideating and prototyping.

What our new tool does

Researchers can pick up assignments by city/county within an election and build a ballot in our database based on the sample ballot they receive from election authorities
Researchers can add positions to the ballot, including ones already in our database and ones we don’t have previous research on
Researchers will be notified if they miss positions we expected to see on the ballot or if they add positions we didn’t expect in this election
Unexpected positions, missing, and new positions will be flagged for additional review and research
Researchers can add candidates to positions, including ones already in the database, both saving them time adding information about the candidate and preventing duplicate research
Submitted candidate research will go straight to the database and be immediately available for our tools

What this means for our customers and our users

When you explore BallotReady, you’ll continue to see the most accurate, comprehensive data available anywhere. And now we’ll be able to get it in your hands even sooner. The efficiencies we’ve gained while also improving our team’s experience means that we’ll be able to bring you even more in the future without compromising quality.