Election Promises
A platform to help citizens make informed voting decision.
Project Summary
ElectionPromises.in is a platform built to help citizens make an informed voting decision in the 2021 Tamil Nadu Legislative Elections. Through the platform, citizens could compare the promises of contesting parties from their election manifestos and view details of candidates contesting in their constituencies. The platform was developed as a response to the lack of provisions for the citizens to make informed voting decisions in the elections. The platform garnered over 12 million views in less than 2 weeks and was lauded by the public.
Role
I served as the Tech and Design Lead of the project, in charge of ideating the platform design and building it using a no-code tool, along with creating marketing collaterals.
Timeline
Feb 2021 - May 2021
Client
Global Shapers Chennai, World Economic Forum
Tools
Challenge
The election manifesto plays a key role in determining the voting behaviour of the voters in Tamil Nadu electoral politics. Enabling people with information about manifestos, promises, and candidate details can lead to informed voting decisions. Even though, the citizens were keen on making informed voting decisions, there existed multiple challenges:
- Learning the election promises required significant time and effort since the information was scattered.
- Prominent news medias were unreliable due to lobbying and biases.
- Candidate data from the Election Commission of India was not accessible for the common citizens to compare.
Process
User Research
The user research process involved design interviews, competitor analysis, and a survey to understand young people’s perception towards elections and voting. The user research was done to unpack the following questions:
- What did the young voters look for while selecting a candidate?
- What were the resources available for voters to make an informed voting decision?
- What role did candidates’ data play in influencing the voting decisions of the young voters?
- What were some of the effective mediums to reach young voters?
Insights
Research revealed various insights which significantly shaped the platform:
- First-time voters saw their votes to be valuable and were determined to make an informed voting decision.
- 80% of the people who participated in the survey or interview didn’t knew about all the candidates who contested in their constituency.
- First-time voters cared more about the promises and the candidates than the history of the party.
- Young voters primarily relied on the elders in their families to decide whom to vote for.
- All the parties released election manifestos, even the small scale ones. However, only the big parties got attention from the press.
User Personas
Priya•OccupationCollege Student•Age19
A third year college student who is voting for the first time. Priya understands basic English but is more proficient in Tamil.
Sathish•OccupationChartered Accountant•Age25
A professional who considers themselves to be socially conscious but not politically aware.
Ragavi•OccupationSales Executive•Age32
Ragavi has voted several times and is politically aware. However, she is facing trouble knowing more about the independent candidates in her constituency.
Conceptualization
The wireframes were created in Balsamiq to determine the information hierarchy and flow. After iterating the wireframes several times by testing them with the users, the platform was built in a no-code platform called Glide.
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Solution
ElectionPromises.in
ElectionPromises.in is a bilingual platform to help citizens make an informed voting decision by enabling them to compare the promises from the corresponding party manifestos and view the details of candidates contesting in their constituencies in the 2021 Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly Elections.
Know The Party Promises
View all the promises made by the parties in different focus areas.
Compare The Promises
Compare the similar promises made by different parties!
Know The Candidates
Learn about the details of all the candidates contesting in the constituency.
Explore Promises By Focus Areas
Explore the promises by the parties in different focus areas such as agriculture, education, industry development, etc.
Usability Testing
Building the platform using Glide allowed us to do quick experiments with various features and usability without adding any development overhead.
- Integrated Analytics: Majority of the buttons in the platform were designed in a way to measure the click rate to get deeper insights into user engagement. The click counts combined with Google Analytics data served as a rich resource for making informed design decisions. The design decisions around making the platform more shareable originated from this data which led to a massive organic reach.
- Expert Reviews: The social impact nature of the platform gave us access to several experts in the UX space who shared nuanced tips on making the data more consumable. This expert guidance combined with user observations played a pivotal role in improving the usability of the platform.
Results
The platform was received well by the citizens of Tamil Nadu and got media coverage as well. With organic word of mouth and celebrity endorsements, the platform became viral a week before the elections. The effectiveness of the platform was revealed when people came forward to mention that they reconsidered their primary voting choice after viewing the information presented in the platform.
12M
Total Views
3 mins
Average Session Time
4
Average Sessions Per User
Media Mentions
The platform received notable mentions in the media and got endorsed by several public figures. Following are links to some of the mentions that the platform received:
The Indian Express, Citizen Matters, Yocee.in, The New Indian Express
The project also received special appreciation at the World Economic Forum where several global leaders appreciated the effort to strengthen civic engagement in local communities and also showed interest in replicating the same for their communities.