The goal for this in-class group assignment was to help teach Georgia voters how to identify misinformation online through a digital artifact.
We decided to take this prompt to the classroom, where we envisioned our absentee voting simulation to be used in conjunction with our worksheet and lesson plan. During our literature review, we found that the youngest voters struggled to understand the absentee ballot voting process, and were more susceptible to misinformation as a result. Much of the misconceptions around voting by mail surround how secure votes are, and we worked to ensure that our simulation would clear misconceptions by highlighting the security features of absentee ballots.
Literature Review
After an initial assessment of the project as a group and early feedback from our classmates, professor, and mentor, we decided to undertake an intense literature review, with our reading focused on four core areas:
- Voting in Georgia
- Gamification
- Preventing the spread of misinformation
- How misinformation impacts voters
Personally, I lead research in the areas of gamification and stopping misinformation. I volunteered to research gamification because I had read some great material on designing educational games as a part of Dr. Roberts’ class on educational technology when I took that course in Spring 2021. The key takeaways from that research was the importance of making sure game components translated well to the instruction. Great educational games have mechanics that are fun, engaging, and educational.
As for misinformation prevention, I went back and re-read the article about the fake news game that our mentor had recommended to me at the beginning of the project. From there, I did a lot of reading about pre-bunking, a proactive method of preventing the spread of misinformation. Pre-bunking relies on teaching students how to identify misinformation by teaching them tactics to spread misinformation and/or teaching them correct information about a subject, so they know when wrong information is spread by sight.
One of my teammates, Randy, led research into voters, and found that young voters were in trouble. They suffered from misinformation about voting by mail, as well as fears about COVID-19. Our other teammate, Kristen, researched voting in Georgia, and found a great deal of information about how to vote in Georgia. In particular, she found Georgia’s system for absentee voting to be convoluted.
Design Direction
After doing more research, our design direction was much clearer than before. We noticed that our research had converged on a set of problems that we could solve together:
- Absentee ballot voting in GA is a multi-step process that many voters, especially younger voters, find confusing
- Younger voters struggle with the most with this process, and are susceptible to misinformation about it as a result
- Pre-bunking, a misinformation mitigation strategy, allows for preventing the spread of misinformation by ensuring students understand a phenomenon before they encounter misinformation
- Active inoculation, pre-bunking through an interactive activity or game, works more effectively than passive inoculation, pre-bunking through a pamphlet or sign
As a result of our research, we decided to create an absentee ballot voting simulation, aimed at high school seniors as brand new voters, designed to both teach them how to vote absentee and counter common misinformation themes about mail-in ballots.
In conversations with both our mentor, Pooja Casula, and our professor, Dr. Nassim Parvin, we were reminded to remember our dual audience, of both students and teachers. We expanded our simulation to be an entire lesson, complete with the absentee ballot simulation interactive, a worksheet for students to complete, an answer key for the teacher, and a lesson plan.
Critique, from our professor and our classmates
What we brought to the table:
- An in-depth concept for an absentee voting lesson, featuring a digital simulation of the entire process, an accompaniment worksheet, and a lesson plan for teachers to use
- Our lesson would be targeted at high school seniors, and use gamification and pre-bunking to make them resistant to misinformation about absentee voting
- We discussed our personas and how they were impacting our design process
Feedback from our professor and our classmates:
- Many of our design inspirations that taught about voting are uninteresting, would like our game to have the look and feel of the multiplication game for children we mentioned liking the design direction of
- It’s important to think about teachers as a secondary audience – how can we make delivering this lesson easy for them?
Our takeaways:
- We want our simulation to be visually appealing for our users, and not take itself too seriously while remaining informative
- We want to be as helpful to teachers as possible while creating this, so we need to focus on the entire classroom experience
Early Prototypes and Feedback
Due to needing to meet outside of class remotely due to COVID-19 and our very busy schedules, we did our earliest prototyping on Figma, as a digital replacement for a more traditional low fidelity paper prototype. Our biggest innovation during this phase was breaking up Georgia’s absentee ballot process into 5 concrete steps.
Revisions, a second prototype, and feedback
We made major revisions to our first prototype before user testing. We added a mascot character, an eagle named Sam, to guide students through the simulation. This helped make the simulation more visually appealing as well as adding an element of humor.
Additionally, we broke the prototype up into significantly more screens. Each step from our five step process now contained multiple screens, spreading out the information for students.
We also added several major functional components to this iteration. The absentee ballot request form and the filling out of the sample absentee ballot were added. We had users fill in Sam’s information, and vote for a variety of candidates with silly bird names. Having students help Sam vote also ensured that no one would believe that they had actually voted during our simulation.
Some positive feedback we got on our second prototype was the navigation bar at the bottom – it allows users to see the entire absentee voting process, while being able to move to any point in that process.
Feedback from our professor and our classmates:
- Colors are washed out, aim for a design language that is closer to the slides we had been using for critiques
- Need to further break up information, still too much on one page
- The blue ellipses at the bottom of the pages look too much like buttons, need to re-frame that information
Our takeaways:
- We revised our color scheme to be more inviting to the user
- We continued to spread out our information over more pages
- For pages with forms taken from the government, we grayed out irrelevant areas to keep the actual forms used while still highlighting the most relevant information
- We restyled our information to be less similar to how buttons look
- Instead, we had Sam speaking to the students to display information
User Survey and Heuristic Evaluation
With our revisions made, we were ready to test our prototypes, both digital and analog, with users. We found three eligible voters in the youngest voters category (18-19 year olds) to test our prototype with.
Each participant completed a pre-survey. We wanted to get a baseline about voter trust and knowledge in mail-in voting. Then, each participant completed the prototype of the simulation. We had participants fill out the worksheet, and then reviewed the answers with them, as a teacher would in class. After this, participants took a post-survey to see how their attitudes and knowledge about absentee voting had changed.
Feedback from our users:
- Confusion about primary elections and need to declare a party
- Confusion about what to do on pages that required users to scroll down, as most of the simulation required button clicking to side scroll
Our takeaways:
- We added more information about primary elections specifically, and why voters are required to declare a party (it’s because Georgia is a closed primary state, so voters must choose a party to vote in the primaries for)
- We added a down arrow on form pages where scrolling down is required to make it more clear what users should do
Final Designs
