heyitsolivia
commented
9 years ago EmailCongress was a proof-of-concept tool that allowed people to contact their legislators in office via email. Members of Congress only have online contact forms, but this tool "made" email addresses for them. Unfortunately, its development wasn't user-centric nor design-led the first time around. A year down the road, the team had become inundated with support ticket emails that were heavily rooted in user confusion around the tool, along with other problems.
EmailCongress needed to be rebuilt to be sustainable.
The design team at the Sunlight Foundation, recognizing that the lack of clarity and poor UX in the tool, sat down and thought about how it could be improved to overcome many of the issues users were complaining about.
To accomplish this, the team spent an enormous amount of time discussing user pain points, diagramming user flows, thinking especially hard about microcopy, and conducting heuristics and usability testing, and engaged in wirestorming.
Just an introduction to design research in the Phantom Mask project.