CONNECTED VOICES

Confidence, not information, is what stands between people and their vote.

SERVICE DESIGN

A civic engagement ecosystem for immigrant voters ahead of the 2026 General Election. Three connected touchpoints — a voting simulator, verified candidate cards, and a hybrid community engagement wall — built on one finding: people don’t abstain because information is missing. They abstain because they aren’t sure they’ll get it right.

ROLE

Service Design, UX Research, UI

DELIVERABLES

Mobile app, Candidate cards, Engagement wall

TEAM

Solo

FOCUS

Civic confidence, inclusion

Connected Voices multilingual civic visual system campaign layouts

Ecosystem: voting simulator, candidate cards, engagement wall

VIEW ARTIFACTS ↓

RINA’S STORY_

Rina has lived in New Zealand for six years. She is eligible to vote. She has never voted here. In October, a text arrives reminding her to check her enrolment.

She opens the enrolment link on her phone during a break at work.

General roll or Māori roll? A question she has never heard before.

She closes the tab, telling herself she’ll do it properly at the weekend.

Enrolment closes 25 October. Advance voting opens the next day.

Design insight

People weren’t avoiding voting. They were avoiding uncertainty. The issue wasn’t information. It was confidence. The issue wasn’t language alone. It was navigating an unfamiliar civic system.

She isn’t disengaged. She doesn’t feel confident enough to continue.

Visible Behaviour

Didn’t enrol before the deadline. Opened the election site, then closed it. Left the party vote blank.

Hidden Experience

Unsure where to begin. Didn't recognise the terminology. Didn't trust their own understanding. Feared being visibly wrong.

Systemic Contributors

Fragmented information. Institutional language. No single place to compare candidates. A deadline that punishes hesitation.

THE WICKED PROBLEM

There was no correct solution here — only better and worse ones.

The definition of this problem changes depending on who you ask. Every intervention changes the system it is measuring. And the people most affected by it are the least represented in the data used to describe it. I could not solve this. What I could do was reduce the number of places where someone gets stopped.

WHERE I GOT IT WRONG

I spent the first phase of this project researching the wrong election.

I scoped the work to local council elections — STV, postal voting, mayors and local boards. In the feedback session it became clear the hesitation participants described had nothing to do with councils. It was about being asked to decide inside a system they had never been taught to read. Rebuilding around MMP cost me a simulator, an information architecture, and roughly a third of the timeline. It bought me the actual problem.

THE HIDDEN STORY

People don’t struggle because information exists.

They struggle when information doesn’t align with how they make sense of the world. For many first-time voters and immigrants, uncertainty began long before they opened a ballot. It began with questions like: Where do I start? Am I doing this correctly? What if I misunderstand something? Designing for clarity meant designing for confidence.

Pattern 01

People spent more energy figuring out where to begin than understanding the information itself.

Design response: Create a consistent visual language that reduces orientation effort across every touchpoint.

Pattern 02

People were constantly asking themselves “What should I pay attention to first?”

Design response: A restrained hierarchy guides attention before asking users to process information.

INTERPRETATION GAP

Government thought:

Information is available.

Citizens experienced:

Information feels inaccessible.

Those are two completely different realities. Understanding that gap became one of the project’s biggest design opportunities.

PROJECTED IMPACT

Metrics that matter to an electoral body, not just to a designer.

Directional indicators from participatory testing — not measured outcomes. Understanding of the two-vote system, recognition of local candidates, multilingual access, and intent to enrol before the deadline all moved up. Ballot errors in simulated voting moved down. Operationally, that means less staff time answering voting questions, lower outreach cost per person reached, and higher trust in official election communications. Three interviews, one workshop, and one round of participatory testing is enough to establish direction and disqualify wrong assumptions. It is not enough to claim effect size.

WHAT CHANGED MY THINKING?

What did I come to understand about people that changed the way I designed?

Behaviour

Interpretation

Underlying Need

System

Design Opportunity

I began this project thinking I was designing clearer election information. I finished it realising that the real challenge was helping people navigate uncertainty.

Information doesn’t exist in isolation. Every person interprets the same experience through their own culture, language, memories, expectations, and lived experiences.

Confusion, hesitation, or disengagement are not problems to solve in themselves—they are clues to a deeper human story. The more I listened to people’s stories, the more I saw that visible behaviours often emerge from invisible experiences. My role as a designer is to understand the experiences beneath the behaviour before proposing solutions. Today, this principle continues to shape how I approach product and service design.

This project taught me that meaningful design isn’t just about making information easier to access. It’s about helping people make sense of the world around them. When we understand how people interpret experiences, we can create products, services, and systems that feel clearer, more welcoming, and more human.