Congress.gov
INDUSTRY SPONSORED • UX DESIGN • RESEARCH
Roles and Responsibilities
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User Research: Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Storyboarding, Persona Mapping, Journey Mapping, Empathy Maps
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UX Design: Sketches, Prototyping, Wireframing, Usability Testing
Project Context
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Fall 2019
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Industry sponsored Capstone
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3 Product Designers, 1 Visual Designer, 1 UX Researcher, 1 Product Manager
Tools
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Figma
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Miro
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Sketch
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Notion
Problem
The Library of Congress has 2 million unique visitors per month who conduct remote research and are interested in comparing current and historical legislative data such as legislative bills, events, senate member and committee information. The website is used by political reporters, lobbyists and analysts to get the latest update on the bills they are interested in.
The team from the Library of Congress reached out to us to analyse the current Congress.gov website and explore new design features for querying the data available and improve the core website functionality.
How might we improve the user experience by helping users better query and explore legislative data on Congress.gov website?
Design Solutions
1. Improve bill text readability and analysis
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A section menu is provided to easily navigate to the desired section of the bill
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Compare different versions of the bill and annotate/highlight
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Export the notes to collaborate with the team
2. Explore bill sponsorship and members affiliation
An interactive timeline and a map visualisation help users easily analyse the sponsors of the bill: the states they represent, their political affiliation, and the major activity which led them to support this bill.
3. Personalised dashboard
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Users can customise their interests to personalise the content on their dashboard.
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Users can sign up to get updates about the bills, committees and members they are interested in.
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Users are suggested trending bills based on the bills they follow or read
The Process
Identifying Users
We identified two primary users, Data Analysts and Professionals, based on our discussions with our client from Library of Congress
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Data Analyst are like legislative analysts working at lobbying firms & data scientists who explore trends
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Professionals are like policy advisors & political journalists that find & create stories from the data
Research and Analysis
After conducting the desk research, we interviewed 8 participants, to understand the how the users use Congress. gov website, their taskflow and pain points. Here are the key insights from the contextual inquiries:
Ideation and Design
Given our research findings, we came up with two design ideas that tackled the problem space
Based on the design concepts, we created storyboard to walk through the user journey and uncover insights about the different scenarios in which users may find themselves interacting with our designs
Next, we created wireframes to make sure proper flow is documented and to elicit feedback from our client. After an expert review from stakeholders, we incorporated the feedback in our wireframes. We then created an user environment diagram (UED), a map of the product which specifies where each feature lives on the product, the connections between the different features and all the actions the users can take within the scope of that feature.
User Testing and Final designs
Designing and testing go hand in hand. We conducted 5 usability evaluations and most of the feedback was target on micro interactions, layout and simpler design. The feedback was incorporated in the final hi fi designs.
The Congress.gov has an established brand guide, but not a style guide. Also, our clients asked us to keep the designs and overall look apolitical. So we took the current design patterns followed on the website combined with the brand guide aesthetics and created a simple style guide for consistency across each member of the team. We also made sure the style guide adheres to the accessibility guidelines.
Bill Page Overview
Compare Bill Text
Annotate Bill Text
Explore Cosponsorship
Preferences Builder
Dashboard - My Feed
Dashboard - Saved Bills
Saved Search
Learnings and Takeaways
We presented the final designs to the team at Library of Congress consisting over 30+ designers, engineers and project managers They were incredibly impressed with our prototype, and were astonished by the amount of detail and thought we put into making the designs more accesible and aesthetic.
This project gave me an opportunity to work on a real world problem and execute end to end design. Something that I learned with this project is that interpersonal skills are a key component of doing good design work. Great design teams are ones that know the work styles, personalities, strengths, and weaknesses of each group member.