Center for Civic Design

It’s #FieldGuide Friday! We make the Field Guides To Ensuring Voter Intent. They each hold 10 guidelines for doing good, simple design for elections. Today, let’s do Vol. 07, Designing election department websites. Ready?

1/ Help voters find your website. Including the words that people search for in your website’s name, headings, and text will help people get to the right place.

2/ Connect your website to other government sites. Voters start by looking for information locally. They often search for their town or county name plus “elections,” which leads them to a local site. But you don’t have to have all election information on your website.

3/ Answer the question: ‘What’s on the ballot?’ Show an example. Voters want to know what’s going on ahead of time, and they want to be sure of what they’re doing when they mark the ballot.

4/ Group navigation to answer voters’ questions. Rather than organizing the site around how the department or board is organized, anticipate — and answer — voters’ questions.

5/ Help visitors know what site they are on and what will be covered there. The purpose of the website is to answer questions rather than advertise the election department or board of elections.

6/ Write links that use words voters use and that help voters know where they will end up. Links and headings that are worded as questions work well.

7/ Put the most important information in the main menu or the center section of the page. Studies show that more than 40% of US adults have low literacy.