TO VISUAL COMMUNICATION
CONNECTED VOICES
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
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.
01
She opens the enrolment link on her phone during a break at work.
02
General roll or Māori roll? A question she has never heard before.
03
She closes the tab, telling herself she’ll do it properly at the weekend.
04
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
Hidden Experience
Systemic Contributors
CANDIDATE TRANSPARENCY
Evidence before persuasion.
CANDIDATE TRANSPARENCY CARD
Botany · National
PARTY CAMPAIGN MESSAGE
“Get New Zealand back on track.”
National Party campaign slogan. Personal statements appear on the full digital profile with a source recorded against each claim.
KEY ISSUES
01
Economy
02
Cost of living
03
Infrastructure
04
Law & order
Verify every claim and compare candidates side by side on the full profile.
✓ Sources: NZ Electoral Commission
THE WICKED PROBLEM
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 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
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
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
01
I began this project thinking I was designing clearer election information. I finished it realising that the real challenge was helping people navigate uncertainty.
02
Information doesn’t exist in isolation. Every person interprets the same experience through their own culture, language, memories, expectations, and lived experiences.
03
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.
04
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.
TO VISUAL COMMUNICATION