Moody Hackathon: Media in the 2018 General Elections

This was my experience from participating in UT Austin’s first-year Moody College of Communication Hackathon.

A Little Background Info

In an effort to spur digital innovation in the field of journalism, the Moody College of Communication launched this new initiative called Moody Hacks.

The goal for this year’s hackathon was:

Inform and engage the public on the election, utilizing innovative technology and storytelling

This is how my team and I tackled the problem and came up with a solution within the ~10 hr timeframe.

Workshop #1 — Design Thinking

Different workshops facilitated by both the UT staff and industry professionals were interspersed throughout the day. The first of which was Design Thinking by IBM.

From this workshop, we were taught to have radical empathy, in other words, going beyond the surface level and understanding the thoughts, motivations, and emotional states underlying the pain points.

We were posed the following questions:

• Who are the most important types of people to inform and engage?
• Do certain groups of people tend to be less informed or engaged?
• Why are people uninformed or misinformed?
• What keeps people from engaging in elections currently?
• What are the biggest challenges for people trying to inform others?

The Problem

Because of the limited time we had, we knew we wouldn’t be able to talk to and observe users in the real world. This constraint influenced us to choose college students as our targeted demographic since we would have the most empathy towards that group as college students ourselves.

Based on our own experiences and the experiences of our friends, we came up with reasons why college students don’t vote:

• They feel like their vote doesn’t matter
• They want to research candidates beforehand but feel overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to sift through
• On the same note, they don’t have time to read up on candidates

Looking at the broader society and the political climate, we also came up with some other challenges we hoped to resolve:

• There’s a lack of trust between the public and the media
• The idea of “Fake news” and the skepticism it’s arousing amongst the public

Design Goals

After pinpointing the problems, we set out to accomplish three things:

1. Bridge the trust gap between the public and the information they receive
2. Help people access information more efficiently
3. Encourage voting by connecting voters to issues they care about

Wireframing

Before entering the wireframing phase, we sketched out the basics of how the screens we chose to design would look. Unfortunately, I didn’t grab a picture of how the sketches looked before deciding to write this up, but you can imagine raw outlines of Sharpie’d shapes on paper. :)

Below is the hi-fidelity wireframe I created using Photoshop. This took up the bulk of our time because Photoshop doesn’t store a library of icons and buttons that we can drag and drop onto the canvas.

Our Product Concept

We eventually decided to build a simple app that provides a centralized feed of information related to candidates they choose to follow. The feed would be filled with articles from various news sources as well as the social media posts of the candidates. Users can also track their reactions and attitudes towards information from and about candidate statements and actions, which will congregate into one visual that sorts political alignment by issue.

This app’s ultimate goal is to actively inform potential voters about candidates and keep a record of where they stand politically on each issue as new information surfaces.

Our Feature Choices

Goal #1 Solution
In efforts to bridge the trust gap between people and the information they take in, we decided to include an Ask-Me-Anything feature, where anyone can ask a question to a particular candidate and the public can upvote or downvote it based on whether or not they think it is an adequate and important question to be addressed. This provides direct access to politicians worrying about any skewing the media could potentially do to relay the information. As for the candidates themselves, they are able to see which issues the constituents care about or are worried about the most. This would allow them to tailor their own campaigns and be open with potential voters.

Goal #2 Solution
Knowing that college students want to minimize the amount of effort they put into gathering information, we incorporated a filtering system allowing users to filter their feed based on how much time they want to spend reading sources. Alternatively, they could simply navigate to the Q&A tab and read short blurbs of what the candidates say about certain issues themselves.

When the time to vote arrives, students can easily refer to their personalized ballot charts to see where they stand. Whether or not they use this data to influence their choices is up to them, but we wanted to make sure this data was readily available as a reference.

Goal #3 Solution
We found it difficult to determine a way to show that every vote matters, so instead we opted for figuring out another means of encouraging students to vote. Just as many people donate to charities whose causes they align with, we wanted students to be able to filter through articles that dealt with issues they personally care about, whether that be education or the environment.

To add a level of personalization, we included a rating feature, where students can rate their sentiments and where they stand on personal statements from candidates from the Ask-Me-Anything as well as articles that they read. Because of how much effort and input users would be putting into this, they would most likely be dissuaded from abandoning the app.

Eventually, all the input would accumulate into a horizontal bar graph that would display a percentage of how much they align with the candidates’ own views according to policy issue. We realize that there are some issues that people care about more than others, so we wanted a data visual that depicted a breakdown of party alignment based on issue.

Unlike other platforms, we didn’t want to show the users who they should vote for in the end. We figured a vote was much more complicated than how many issues you agree on with a candidate. Instead, we wanted the user to figure that out themselves based on what points of contention they feel most passionate about.

Prototyping

Because we would be presenting this at an expo, we wanted to quickly prototype the wireframes into InVision to show the interactions and add an interactive component to our product.

Below is our prototype:

Click here to view the project `TBD`

A Note

I must concede that the designs could be greatly improved in a vast number of ways, but in the limited time we were given, we weren’t able to completely think through why one design element was placed where it was or if a feature would feasibly work. Rather, we focused on the ideas behind them and the goals we’d hope for them to achieve.

Thanks for the read! Just because it isn’t said enough already, don’t forget to vote in this year’s upcoming midterm elections if you haven’t already! :)