“How might we help women find the leadership resources that are the best fit for them?”
VoteRunLead is a non-profit that trains women to run for political office, and win.
My role
Organize and conduct user and stakeholder interviews
Facilitate product critiques, affinity mapping, and user persona development
Align stakeholders and project team on the product vision and core requirements
Design user flows and prototypes
The problem
While VRL provided their own trainings and tools, there was no central repository of local or national resources for women across the country to find the best resources. With the ambitious goal to train 30,000 women by 2020, VoteRunLead needed to increase its online presence and reach.
Discovery
We began our discovery with a competitive analysis and interviews to gain a better sense of the business goals and end-user challenges to accessing leadership resources. We spoke to 3 key stakeholders, including VRL’s CEO, and 4 organization members to learn more about the following questions:
How are women currently finding resources and support to engage in political leadership? What are the current challenges?
What is most important to folks when looking for the right resources for themselves?
How should the experience of accessing resources extend beyond a digital product?
After our interviews and desk research, we used a series of activities including journey mapping, clustering, and users personas to identify a set of insights. These insights continued to inform the vision, critical requirements, and feature prioritization for the product.
Affinity Map: We organized phrases from our user and stakeholder interviews into the following categories: Event Database Elements, User Experience, Feature Ideas, Stakeholder Goals, Pain Points (for Organizations), Pain Points (for Users). From this affinity mapping, we extracted three key findings (below) to guide our product design.
Key Findings
Women need to be able to find events that are suitable to a number of characteristics including their experience level, political interests, and location.
Since engaging in political leadership can often be a daunting process, the tool should provide a safe and supportive environment.
Due to the ever-changing nature of resources, it is critical that the product has the correct mechanisms in place to keep information consistently up to date.
Ideation
Based on our vision, we began to ideate on a collaborative, online access point that would be consistently updated, inclusive of users’ needs, and accessible at both a local and national scale. We wanted to create a simple, visual engaging tool for users to find political resources and engage with fellow members.
Reflection
Due to time constraints of the internship and budget, I left this project during its prototyping phase. Our next step would have been to clearly define the product requirements and user test the initial wireframes in order to further improve the product.