Engaging Youth in the Provincial Voting Process
Client: Elections Ontario / May 2025
Design Challenge
Since the Elections Ontario (EO) mobile app launched in 2022, it has seen little evolution and declined user engagement, especially among youth. How might the EO app incentivize youth participation in the democratic experience, while supporting field staff?
Approach
To understand opportunities for service improvement, our team mapped the user journey, service touchpoints, and supporting infrastructure in a service blueprint, and conducted user research to identify what an ideal voting experience could look like for both electors and polling staff.
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District #0514:
499 Have Voted · 47% Prepared
Live Elector Participation by District
Project Snapshot
Team
5 Designers
Timeline
5 days
Tools
Figma
Miro
Constraints
Solution may not include internet voting; voting must occur in-person or by mail
For security purposes, app may not interface with technology systems used inside polling locations
View the prototype
Service Blueprint & Outcome Mapping
Before identifying service improvement opportunities to the EO app, we needed to adequately familiarize ourselves with the service landscape. Following the six service stages as outlined in the client brief, our team mapped user and provider touchpoints with the service, as well as supporting infrastructure involved in each stage. We utilized the client brief, the client presentation/Q&A, and secondary research to populate the blueprint.
User Research and Idea Generation
Rapid User Research
The goal of user research was to identify obstacles to efficiency, security, and accessibility in the voting process. I led the research planning and facilitation, which involved asking users to organize images of touchpoints they'd interact with in the voting process and asking follow-up questions based on their positioning of the touchpoints.
Synthesis
Our user research participants provided insight into what points of the user journey they wish could go differently, which we pinpointed on our existing service map as pictured below. Specifically, users indicated a need for:
Increased motivation to use the app beyond it simply listing "requirements"
Reduced wait times in polling stations
An aspect of fun attached to voting
Greater app visibility prior to or at the beginning of election season, as 0 participants were aware of the app prior to our user research
Idea generation
We took pen to paper to illustrate how solution ideas would manifest in the user journey. Each lo-fi storyboard only focused on one idea at a time, which we later realized was limiting our ideation process. We chose to combine a few different storyboards into a more comprehensive solution.
The Solution as a Story
The white background of the primary nav matched the white background of tribunal-specific pages
A colour that separates tribunal-specific pages from the primary nav indicates greater semantic separation
Personalized Onboarding
I contributed to the design of the personalized onboarding flow. This solution specifically targeted user needs for efficiency while alleviating the workload of EO polling and field support staff on election day by better ensuring elector preparedness.
Solution 1
Personalized Onboarding
Asking questions during onboarding to generate a personalized checklist that help voters stay on track throughout the entire process
Why this matters
33.9% of young people under 25 said they didn’t vote due to “the lack of information, understanding, and knowledge”.
According to Elections Canada, young people are less likely to vote because they “perceived the voting process as too difficult”.
Engagement and Visibility
The second component of our solution targeted the user needs of fun and engagement by providing users with social media sharing capabilities, as well as an interactive voter turnout map that replaces passively learning election results.
“Voting is important, but the experience feels so flat. I wish the app made it more engaging or gave me something to share.”
Interactive features that makes the voting experience more public, social, and rewarding, especially for first-time and Gen-Z voters:
Interactive, Turnout Heat Map
“I Voted” Social Share
Why this matters
73% of people feel more informed through social media (Pew Research).
Gen Z views voting as a choice, not a duty (Elections Canada).
Solution 2
Engagement + Visibility
My takeaways
Our best ideas involved benefitting users and the service provider as equally as possible. Realizing this taught me how crucial a role service design plays in transforming organizations for the better. Working with Elections Ontario as a client also provided unique insight into how to design for political neutrality and credibility. Upon presenting our solutions to the Elections Ontario team, we discussed the appropriateness of social media features for a public agency that does not want to alienate older voters. This allowed us to further refine our sensitivity to competing user needs, and taught us to position such innovative features as lightly integrated and grounded in evidence on social influence.