I’ve actually had this idea before. For almost a decade, I ran a consultancy with my partner, helping organizations build engagement and mobilize people to make change in the world. At the time, Obama had just been elected president and the world of digital campaigning was obsessed with how he did it. There was a combination of tactics. In the field: snowflake models and personal narrative. Online: user experience optimization, A/B tests, and fundraising funnels. These were some of the tactics we helped organizations employ for themselves.
We can use new tactics to make the most of how we listen, engage, and mobilize.
I have an idea:
And that worked for a while too
Optimizing page layouts and button colours was exciting. There was the semblance of a science about it and we could point to A/B tests to say “this is what our supporters want.” In it’s best form, UX optimization did a lot to increase signups and to raise money. In it’s worst form, it led people like Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats to the logical conclusion of over-optimized, and ultimately demobilizing campaigns.
See the thing is that clicks are only one indicator of engagement. We’re a movement of people who care deeply about the well being of the world and our neighbours. We are great listeners and even better organizers. There are UX tactics that can serve our cause much better.
A/B testing, UX optimization, green button or red button, these were ideas adopted into politics and movement building from a burgeoning field of UX practice originating in tech and product design. UX practice has matured in the past decade. Do a Linkedin search today and what’s evident is major tech companies are investing heavily in User Experience Research and Human Centered Design
A couple years ago I saw a post in a newsletter for a Human Centered Designer. I had studied Human Centered Design in my grad program but I had never seen a job posting call it out exclusively. The International Development world has been pioneering this approach as they come to understand that a human-centered approach to program design is essential to building resilient communities. Human Centered Design had become written into almost every USAID and UN request for proposal in the past 5 years. Recently, tech has started to follow suit.
For the past two years, I have used Human Centered Design as a framework to understand the experiences, challenges, and needs of the people I’m designing for.
This framework is composed of 4 broad phases of design. Each phase is co-created with the people who will ultimately use the design.
Research your end user* and build empathy with them
FIRST,
This is predominantly qualitative research. The intent is to use a combination of interviews, observation, community mapping, and co-design to both frame the problems of the participants and smash assumptions you might have about your solutions.
Empathy is the mindset we employ here. It means being humble, using all five senses to engage and understand human to human.
Look, we do a lot of this already. Union organizers do this as a sixth sense. Deep listening is something volunteers are trained in across lots of different organizations. Human Centered Design takes this listening to new places through user experience research.
Meaning, a practice of mapping, analyzing, and exploring the experience of stakeholders and supporters, what challenges they face, their reasons for behaving how they do, their guiding principles, and how they react in different situations.
* I say “user” because it’s the language of user experience design. User Experience (UX) refers to the experience a person has as they navigate your system, services, products, or processes.
Synthesize what we learned, use it to brainstorm ideas and solutions
OKAY, AND THEN?
No reports, no presentations; synthesis is a team sport. Brainstorming based on the UX research is a facilitated process that is done with users and stakeholders. In the Human Centered Design toolkit are workshops and activities designed to help brainstorm out-of-the-box ideas rooted in user experience.
This is the phase that often appeals to people: the opportunity to think big, get out of old ways of thinking and be inspired by the stories and experiences of the people you care most about.
But we don’t stop at the blue sky. Brainstorming also includes processes of refinement and decision making.
NEXT,
Prototyping is what makes this process lean and resilient. Why go down the road of creating a whole ad spot before testing it with a focus group? It’s expensive and time consuming. Storyboard the ad first, or act it out in front of your audience. Prototype your idea in the most low-cost, lightweight form possible that can still solicit user feedback.
Prototype your ideas with a lo-fi design
Test your prototype with people & iterate based on their feedback
FINALLY,
Maybe we zigged when we should’ve zagged. There’s no efficacy in investing in solutions that haven’t been tested. Usability testing is bigger than asking for opinions or feedback. It’s about observing and understanding user behaviour.
I say “finally” but it isn’t really. I said earlier this framework is cyclical. Because your prototype was so low cost, so lightweight, so lo-fi, you’re good to do it over and over until you get it right, each time working with the people who will ultimately make or break your project: your supporters, your volunteers, your users.
It’s not lost on me that when I say lean, resilient, lightweight, or cheap, the first thing that comes into your mind isn’t “design”
Bear with me, though. Imagine you’ve done a survey, you’ve had strategy meetings, you’ve hired a Communications firm and you’re about to release an ad. First, though, you want to put it in front of a group of people to find out what they think. If they give you deep or meaningful feedback, what room do you really have to make changes? You’ve already gotten approval for the ad from the board. Are you really going to scrap it and start again?
Often by the time we get in a room with our users, we’ve already sunk money and especially time going down one road. What if something changes in the middle of a campaign? Our surveys or focus group’s opinions may not apply anymore.
We can build resilience and agility into our processes through prototyping and iteration. We can create a base of empathy for our users to be able to shift and respond without having to start over.
From The Sprint Book, by Jake Knapp
Let me show you how this could play out
Your field team is the face of your campaign at the door. Each day for a week, we run exit interviews with them, we shadow a few of them and see how they operate door to door. We create personas for different types of volunteers. In a workshop with volunteers, we explore some of their challenges and co-design and prototype new tools for persuasion. The next week, we go out together and test these tools with real supporters.
You host events monthly but it’s always the usual suspects. How can you stay relevant? How can you reach new people? We run exercises to understand your internal strategy and who you would like to reach. We put together user samples of people that meet your target demographic. We run a series of visits and interviews with them to understand their needs and how your organization can meet them. Working with your org, we brainstorm ways to reach your target demo, prototype, and then return to our original research groups to test the prototypes.
You prime your union members each election to vote in their interests for pro-union parties. Still, your membership is swayed by conservative promises, or by strategic voting. We create a map of influence as an initial design artifact to start exploring the challenge. We speak to union members at different levels of engagement. We run a workshop with a group of members to co-design an election engagement campaign that upholds their collective values. We create storyboards and test them with different groups.
You’re ready to invest in an annual fundraising campaign and you want to make sure you get the approach right. We work with your stakeholders to run a needs assessment and conduct a review of the successes and failures of past campaigns. We conduct research with a number or potential donors and create personas and ideal user journeys for each, as well as roadmap out key milestones over the next year. We design prototypes that focus on parts of the user journey and iterate on the experience design while working with people representing each of our personas.
This is the moment when I put out the call to action
If you agree there’s room for a new approach, there’s a lot we can do together. First of all, if you’re seeing this page on my website, it’s because I sent it to you. Meaning, I want to talk about partnership, about opportunities.