Center for Civic Design
The Center for Civic Design’s goal is to “make every interaction between government and citizens easy, effective, and pleasant”. Their election design projects aim to bring awareness to the burdens that voters face, focus on the improvement of election design and design principles for election systems.
The ask: Conduct a diary study to understand the experience of voters in Baltimore City with low income and limited education as they prepare to vote.
The Team
Sandra Koranteng, Nicole Eggleston and Briona Jones
When: October 2020 – November 2020
My team and I created and conducted a diary study to understand Baltimore City voters’ experience beginning two weeks before Election Day and ending the day after Election Day.
How: created a screener questionnaire to find participants, utilized Google Meet for pre- and post- interviews and Google Voice to send the text prompts that we had planned to send them everyday.
What we learned: the power of transcriptions, how to moderate and conduct a diary study, how to analyze qualitative data to make recommendations based on the participants’ experiences
Diary Study
Text Prompts
All of the text prompts we sent to the participants everyday were asked about specific points of their experiences, such as what they have seen, conversations they have had, and media consumption.
Findings
My team and I were able to determine our findings from the qualitative data we collected by transcribing our interviews and coding the responses to see a common thread.
Storytelling
Through this study, we learned the significance of understanding people’s experience and by telling a story with your data you can make a stronger impact.