Polaris

Tech For Campaigns connects volunteers who work in the tech industry to democratic and progressive political campaigns. In 2020, they wanted to combine their existing Fundraiser app with a dialer that campaigns could use to execute political fundraising calls. 

BACKGROUND

Enhancing a Successful App

Tech For Campaigns had built an app called Fundraiser that compiled publicly available voter political donation history from federal and state agencies. Fundraiser was popular and successful, but users wanted to be able to take direct action in-app against that data. Tech For Campaigns decided to acquire a calling tool called One Nation that could integrate with Fundraiser so campaigns could execute political fundraising calls (also known as “call time”). While there are many call time tools on the market, the integration of voter fundraising history was a key differentiator for Tech For Campaigns. I was brought in on a contract basis to execute all designs.

Role

  • UX designer

  • UI designer

  • Visual designer

Deliverables

  • Sitemap

  • Wireframes

  • High-fidelity interactive desktop and mobile prototypes

APPROACH

User Interviews

The Director of Product conducted numerous interviews with various candidates and current/former campaign staff to understand their processes for preparing and executing call time. Due to budget constraints, I did not take part in the interviews, so reviewed the interview notes. From these interviews, a clear picture of campaign processes started to emerge. Since call time was a well established political practice, most interviewee’s processes were very similar, depending on a person’s role. That made it clear the majority of call time practices had defined divisions of labor, usually involving 2-3 people.

Bridging Fundraiser and One Nation

When handling voter political donation history, there are many legalities to consider. Not only are state and federal laws different, each state has their own laws, as well. Adding calling capabilities increased the complexity. I met frequently with product and engineering to understand and hash out how users could and could not handle the data they would have access to, since this would directly affect Polaris’s UX.

DESIGN

Exploring Concepts

The One Nation dialer had not been officially designed, so its UX was quite rudimentary. To experiment with different approaches to facilitating call time, I wireframed a variety of concepts. This not only helped assess the pros and cons of design decisions, but revealed additional technical and compliance considerations the designs needed to address. 

Call time concept designs

Profile concept designs

Sitemap

Using the learnings from user interviews, team technical meetings, and exploring the existing Fundraiser and One Nation apps, I created a sitemap structured to efficiently facilitate call time processes. Considering those clear divisions of labor, a majority of each user’s tasks could be completed across about two pages.

A Desktop & Mobile Experience

From user interviews, it was clear a user’s role determined if they primarily used desktop or mobile to complete tasks. For users whose work was to prepare for call time, they primarily used desktop. For users who actually placed calls, they used both desktop and mobile. Due to time and resource constraints, this meant while the entire app would be built for desktop, only the call time experience would be built for mobile. 

Depending on the size of a campaign’s fundraising team, call time involves multiple people. For the mobile experience, the focus was on executing call time across multiple phone lines with conferencing capabilities. On desktop, we focused on developing advanced filters and surfacing donors’ potential giving capabilities, as well call time.

Landing Page

Once Polaris launched, I also designed and built the marketing landing page for leads to schedule demos with the sales team in Squarespace.