Design Project — HCI @ IIT Bombay
I had the opportunity to participate in an intensive short design course called Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at IIT Bombay. As part of the course, we were tasked with a group design project that aimed to address real-world challenges through innovative design solutions.
Our group, consisted of 5 passionate and talented individuals (including me), was assigned a project focused on the 2024 elections in India. This project not only honed my skills in HCI and design processes but also reinforced the importance of empathy and collaboration in creating meaningful and impactful solutions.
Problem Statement
Project Name: Backend app to support elections
Brief: Design a backend web app for polling officers to manage elections better
In the recent Mumbai elections, there were three election booths next to each other at my polling centre. One election booth had a long queue. The other two booths had almost no queues. The main reason why the ECI can’t do load balancing at polling booths is that a voter is tied to a specific polling booth. In this project, we will attempt to create an application to manage voters so as to speed up the process of polling and also to manage loads. If the concept becomes successful, this “roaming option” can be extended to a municipal ward, then to a Vidhan Sabha constituency, and perhaps even to the whole Lok Sabha constituency. Please remember though, that the system should be 100% compatible with the current paper system (remote polling centres have only one polling booth).
User Interviews
As part of our project, we conducted user interviews to gather valuable insights and data. Each interview provided us with rich information, including users’ live experiences with the election process, their challenges with voting, and their overall perceptions of the electoral system. These interviews were instrumental in shaping our design solution, allowing us to address real user needs and create a more effective and inclusive voting experience.
- Interviews — 3 interviewd taken by each person in the team.
- Different user roles chosen — Polling Officer, Voter, Nodal Officer, Zonal Officer, Postal Ballot Officer, Party Leaders/PartyAgents.
- Setup — Interview was taken at user’s office spaces.
- Team — Observer and Interviewer (with note taking responsibilities).
This interview was not contextual but based on past experiences user’s had during their voting day. Mainly, we observed their expressions about the whole experience and tried to gather potential data. Team had prepared the questionnaire based on the problem statement and had it all planned with the script. Scripted interview let us focus on the main goals of this HCI project.
Artefacts
Artefacts from users are indeed crucial for user research and making informed design decisions. These artefacts can include any tangible or intangible outputs generated by users during their interaction with a product or service. Here are some artefacts which proved to be very crucial for our study:-
- User Manual for Polling Officer
- Voter Slip (generated for voting day)
- ID Verification documents (Required for registration on voting day)
- Polling booth blueprints / Floor Plan
Affinity Mapping
Start of Affinity Process
- All the user insights, statements, observations were written in the Miro board.
- Then each statement was organised and categorised in each section according to the similarities, patterns and themes.
- Insights were then prioritised from this board.
Overall, affinity mapping is a valuable technique in user study that transforms raw data into actionable insights, enhances team collaboration, and supports a user-centered design process.
Flow Model
A flow model is an essential tool in user research for UX design because it provides a detailed visual representation of the user’s interactions with a system, process, or product. Here are some key reasons why flow models are important in UX research:
- Understanding user’s processes
- Identifying pain points
- Enhancing collaboration across systems
- Streamline process
- Improve efficiency
- Support decision making
- Enhance overall product experience
Key insights
- POs are expected to work long hours in unfavourable conditions with inadequate provisions and compensation, affecting their productivity, while also fearing mistakes due to high stakes, yet receiving lenient training without evaluation.
- PO’s are expected to do a long process of searching registers manually on the voting day to verify the voters. This is a very big register called “16A register” which takes time to search for person names.
- Real-time updates on crowd levels will help manage the flow efficiently as families tend to travel together.
- Voter education is still inadequate and causes multiple trips to the polling station for people. Despite that, some people believe voting to be an important responsibility and are willing to make the trip to vote.
Prioritised Insights are:-
- Focusing on reducing queues by streamlining the verification process.
- Increasing staff and handling floor plans alignments for productivity.
- Floor Plan updates and machines for smooth transactions.
Persona
The target audience is the Polling Booth Officers.
We learned a new technique for persona making that is to make a story video or storyboard of target user based on the insights we gathered from user interviews. The story in the video or storyboard helps designers to understand user’s POV, challenges, needs etc.
Storyboarding helps designers visualise and communicate the user experience, ensuring that all team members and stakeholders have a clear understanding of the user journey. Here are the key benefits of using storyboards in UX design:
1. Visualising User Journeys: Storyboards illustrate how users interact with a product over time, providing context for user actions and decisions. They depict the complete user journey, from the initial interaction to achieving their goals, highlighting potential pain points and opportunities for improvement.
2. Facilitating Empathy: By depicting the user’s perspective, storyboards help designers and stakeholders empathise with users, understanding their motivations, emotions, and challenges. They transform abstract user research data into relatable, human stories, making it easier to grasp user needs and behaviors.
3. Effective Communication: Storyboards provide a visual narrative that is easy to understand, ensuring that all team members and stakeholders have a shared vision of the user experience. They serve as a common language between designers, developers, marketers, and other stakeholders, facilitating better collaboration and alignment.
4. Identifying Issues and Opportunities: By mapping out the user journey, storyboards help identify potential pain points and usability issues that users might encounter. They reveal opportunities for enhancing the user experience, such as new features, design improvements, or additional support.
5. Guiding Design Decisions: Storyboards provide a reference point for making design decisions, ensuring that choices are user-centered and aligned with the overall user journey. They allow designers to test different scenarios and interactions, helping to evaluate how design changes impact the user experience.
6. Simplifying Complex Processes: Storyboards break down complex processes into simpler, sequential steps, making it easier to understand and address each part of the user journey. They show how different parts of the system interact and depend on each other, ensuring a holistic approach to design.
Here’s a sneak peak of a storyboard I created individually for the project.
Ideation
Our ideation phase involved working on key insights like
- Simplifying verification process for PO’s
- Creating better polling booth floor plans
- Staff assignments and placements
Crazy 8 ideas
Crazy 8s is a rapid ideation technique that helps UX designers generate a large number of ideas in a short amount of time. This method is particularly useful for exploring different design solutions and fostering creativity. This helped us in:-
- Divergent thinking
- Rapid exploration
- Inclusive Participation
- Visual Thinking
- Identifying common themes
- Iterative improvement
- Space for experimentation
- Stimulate Creativity
- No judgements
- No right and wrongs
- Fun and engaging
Below are the ideas generated in this activity:-
Reducing queues on voting day can significantly improve the efficiency and voter experience. Here are some ideas for polling officers to streamline the process:
1. Digital Verification: Set up digital verification to check IDs and get the queue going. Currently the manual register search process is time consuming hence process getting delayed.
2. Separate Lines for Pre-Registered Voters: Create separate lines for voters who have pre-registered or used an online verification system, reducing the verification steps needed on-site.
3. Increase Verification Desks: Increase the number of verification desks and staff, particularly during peak voting hours, to handle a higher volume of voters simultaneously.
4. Pre-Scheduled Voting Slots: Allow voters to book time slots for voting to evenly distribute the flow of voters throughout the day and avoid peak time congestion.
5. Express Lanes for Simple Cases: Create express lanes for voters with straightforward, easily verifiable IDs to speed up their processing.
6. Advance Voter Education: Use media campaigns and community outreach to educate voters about required documents and the verification process, reducing the time spent on-site addressing questions and issues.
7. Dedicated Help Desks: Establish help desks to assist voters with complicated ID issues or those who need additional verification, preventing delays at the main verification desks.
8. Volunteer Assistance: Recruit volunteers to assist with crowd management and provide information, ensuring voters are prepared and have their IDs ready when they reach the verification desk.
Design
So, what were our ideas behind the final solution.
- This problem statement may not need a full new app as we collectively liked the idea about leveraging the existing ECI app which already consists of the user’s data with all ID proofs linked.
- There would be separate helpdesk for people stuck with ID verfication failures, missing documents, disabled audience and senior citizens. This will not hamper the queues resulting in faster movement.
- Multiple EVM machines will help voters and many votes will be casted at the same time not affecting any queues or no waitings involved.
- Multiple queues in same booth will also make the process complete faster.
Above is the glimpse of our new floor plan of polling booth and new user journey diagram of the whole voting process.
The final output shows that:-
- How polling officer duties are taken care in each step.
- How a voter has a quick and seamless voting experience of the whole process.
- How the floor plan of the polling booth should be organised.
- How leveraging existing apps can help build the ecosystem of products.
Prototype Testing
- Basic testing was done with the class students to understand how this process will work in real world.
- One polling officer was made to sit during this testing to get his inputs on the process.
- Identifying pain points was simpler.
- Identifying and addressing usability issues early in the development process can prevent costly redesigns and fixes after the product has been launched.
- Continuous usability testing with real users allows for iterative improvements, ensuring the product evolves based on actual user needs and feedback over time.
- Facilitators can ask users for immediate clarification on their actions and thoughts, gaining more detailed feedback and understanding the reasons behind their difficulties or preferences.
Final Thoughts…
We learned several valuable outcomes during final solution like:
1. Products or services are developed with a deep understanding of user needs, ensuring that the final design aligns closely with what users actually want and need.
2. The process encourages creative thinking and exploration, leading to innovative solutions that may not have been discovered through traditional problem-solving methods.
3. Design process often results in tangible prototypes that can be tested and iterated upon, allowing for refinement and improvement before final implementation.
4. Through testing and feedback, design thinking helps validate concepts, ensuring that the solutions are feasible, viable, and desirable.
5. The emphasis on empathy ensures that the final outcomes are empathetic to user needs, fostering stronger connections between the product and its users.
6. By involving users early and often, design thinking helps identify potential issues and address them before they become major problems, reducing the risks associated with new product launches.
7. The iterative nature of design thinking fosters a culture of continuous improvement, encouraging ongoing refinement and enhancement of solutions based on user feedback and changing needs.
Thank you!
Hope my research will help all designers in some ways :)
