Stronger user direction to email legislators after publishing testimony

[nesanders]

@mvictor55 I think we need stronger guidance for the user that after they publish their testimony they need to take an additional action to email it to legislators for it to be considered by the committee. Right now, we provide a mailto link that is shown alongside a 'tweet it' link, but it may not be obvious to the user that the first link (to email) is absolutely essential to their testimony being heard. I think we should emphasize this more and provide more instruction on the post-publish modal dialog.

[alexjball]

@nesanders do the new designs in figma address your concerns? https://app.zenhub.com/workspaces/design-and-development-629389aa02e9d200139c90b8/issues/codeforboston/advocacy-maps/504

[nesanders]

@alexjball @jamesvas5307 excited to take a look!

I can't access the Figma / Zeppelin right now, however. Is this still the correct account to use?

[nesanders]

@alexjball @jamesvas5307 thanks to you both for your help logging into Zeplin.

I really like the look and feel of the bill page and testimony submission, but I would propose some stronger user direction beyond what we have in the mockup. I don't know the right way to represent this in the UI, but these are the goals I'd like to achieve --

• It should be clear to the user before they start writing their testimony that they will have to send an email after they click 'submit'(perhaps a header disclaimer at the top of the righthand 'submit' sidebar on the bill page?)
• I think it should be an expectation (not an option / checkbox) that ALL testimony submitted will be published to the website AND emailed (manually by the user) to their legislator. It should always be both.
• After submission, it should be reinforced and made very clear to the user that they still need to send an email (perhaps a big pop-up?)

If these goals differ from anything discussed previously or from others' opinions, I'd be very glad to discuss!

[mvictor55]

A quick follow up - I agree with Nathan generally. We could frame the expectation that "testimony is to be published to archived and emailed" as a reflection of our goal to ensure the archive accurately reflects the testimony emailed

Perhaps this is an opportunity for an "?" icon

[jamesvas5307]

@nesanders @mvictor55 Interesting points, not under the impression, I was under/told that we are forcing users to email their testimony to their legislators. We can provide user education (like Matt suggested) but I think the ultimate ask here is what we want to set up our product provides as a service to our users and what they value by providing testimony. If this is supposed a tool just to notify legislators, then thats what you should go down. But are there use cases where users simply just want to provide testimony to feel heard by the community in Maple and possibly empower users to go to hearings as a group or other levels of community driven initiatives. What if I dont want to send my testimony to a legislator because Im looking for more validation from fellow peers prior to sending it? I dont think from a UX perspective we should take away the freedom of providing testimony, however, if we provide that level of expectation throughout the product, its something we should absolutely do. This is a key example of something I'd like to dive into on usability testing.

And I'll look into providing insight and updating UI under this direction so we have it!

[mvictor55]

This sounds like the right conversation. Perhaps the boxes are by-default "checked", and then if they are unchecked the user will see a warning/pop-up explaining why they might reconsider

[nesanders]

Hi @jamesvas5307 I'm glad you brought this up - these are foundational goals we should discuss and all be aligned on.

I think we've tried to be consistent that the primary purpose of our site is to facilitate (and publicly archive) testimony from the public to the legislature. Here is the website tagline on the current (prod) version of our site: "The Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement (MAPLE) platform makes it easier for anyone to submit and see testimony to the Massachusetts Legislature about the bills that will shape our future."

So, our primary goal is to help people get their testimony to the legislature.

For better or worse, I don't think we can "force" people to send the follow up email that actually goes to the legislators, but (from my perspective) it is imperative that the user have complete clarity that they DO NEED TO manually send an email to complete the submission process to the legislature.

I'd be glad to discuss more if you'd like.

[jamesvas5307]

@nesanders Thanks for clarifying. I would say if thats the KPI, I'd be curious on how that legislative outreach will look like and possible issues that may arise. Legislation gets tons of emails (or Im under the impression that they do) is there a way to not spam them and provide that information. In addition, I think we would need to think about possibilities that emails like this from maple could be getting automatically sent to spam.

As for UI, lets schedule a call about this. I feel like you're saying it's a key element to email their testimony to a legislators but now mention that they can opt out of that option. If thats the case, we discussed in the past that the email testimony will be checked on as a default value. So if thats so, checks and that UI should work and we can focus on the level of messaging why some one should email this but I want to make sure we are in alignment here as this is the key feature/value prop you are establishing with the Maple Project.

[alexjball]

I think this has been addressed by the new 3 step add/edit design