Election results data dashboard

Internally referred to as “firehose” this election results dashboard will display new presidential election vote dumps from The Associated Press at a highly granular, bingeable level. This product will be a major differentiator for the Post, providing unprecedented insight into vote-by-vote state-level analyses for users in the upcoming presidential election and lean into the liveliness of election race tracking seen on social media.

Role

Lead designer, led end-to-end product design, user research and handoff.

Teams

News, elections, engineering, product, news graphic design, data and analytics, ads, monetization and product design

Timeframe

May to October 2024

Set to launch November 2024 for presidential election

The Problem

In the leadup to the 2020 election, the Election Engineering Team built a Slack channel that served as a testbed for our AP results data pipelines. As each batch of votes came in, a Slackbot sent messages to the channel that looked something like this:

463,968 new votes reported in the Pennsylvania presidential race. Edison estimates 1,024,153 votes are remaining.

Pennsylvania presidential race vote leader has FLIPPED. Biden leads Trump by 3 votes.

On election night, hundreds of messages like this flooded in. Eventually, as election night dragged into election week, the messages slowed. However, as the outstanding vote got smaller and the result of the election came down to a few states, each new vote dump became increasingly consequential. In the final days of the election, hundreds of Post staff members swarmed the channel and reacted to the vote changes in real time.

We currently have no clear product solution to engage users in the quiet but intense period between the day after an election and when the race is called. While our existing election results pages will feel increasingly quiet with less frequent, but often more critical, vote updates, we can send our most engaged readers to a central dashboard where they can follow the play-by-play. 

Our goals for this product are to:

  • Improve transparency: Taking ownership of the presentation and context with which this information is made available via our existing tools is an opportunity to provide unprecedented election results data transparency to our users, and help them understand how results are reported, counted, and validated. 

  • Provide context: Users desire as-it-happens real-time vote updates and will seek it out elsewhere if we do not provide it for them. We can meet that user need and provide better context to situate the meaning of individual vote updates in the context of the state of the race by combining the firehose experience with other election results tools like the model and reporter insights. 

  • Aggregate relevant updates: Hook users in the days after the election when results page updates are less frequent, but increasingly consequential, by aggregating the latest updates in one place. 

Early Research / Context / Competitive analysis and explorations

There was no plan for what the user interface would look like since this was the first product of it’s kind for the Post. The information I had to build from was the pieces of data the Associated Press releases to the Post on election night in the form of vote update.

  • conducted a competitive analysis of platforms that used some type of data dashboard to organize large amounts of information, and focused on looking for live experiences that included many updates. This caused me to look into a lot of stock market products, a similar website from a standalone developer that scraped The New York Times election data during the 2020 presidential election and other election tools.

  • led a cart sorting activity with internal stakeholders to learn what pieces of data from the list we received from the Associate Press were the most important, and how knowledgeable users would group them together

Concepting

  • Wire-framed multiple different concepts that illustrated different strategies to organize the information on one page.

  • Collaborated with engineers, data scientists and election team to ideate what data we could show users and in what presentations.

  • Iterated design organization strategy away from original “firehose” concept from product team where all data for all states was aggregated into one feed to a more user friendly state by state dashboard view.

  • The election team has an existing visual style, so this new product had to fit into their existing visual language while presenting brand new information.

  • Co-conducted moderated user tests with content designer on internal colleagues who would be potential users of such a product to help identify potential labels and language for the data dashboard and feed.

  • Led many critiques and feedback sessions with cross company teams to solicit feedback and iterate designs.

  • Quickly iterated designs based on continuously changing requirements and restrictions from engineering and data science teams as they worked to figure out the backend and feasibility of the project.

User research

As this was a first of it’s kind product for the Post, I decided conducting a moderated user test with potential users would help us understand how clear the interface was, since it presented a large amount of information, and measure interest in such a tool.

  • Created screener to identify participants within the target user group.

  • Created user testing plan and script for interview sessions.

  • Co-moderated user interview sessions with research team member.

  • Iterated designs based on feedback and insights from research sessions.

You can find some of the insights and actionable feedback I received below:

Final designs

Click to enlarge

Race called state

Empty state

1024px Breakpoint

768px Breakpoint

The Results

This project went live on November 5th, 2024 for the 2024 presidential election. Users were able to see live voting updates roll in as polls closed across the US, comparing raw voting data with insights and graphs from The Post’s election model. You can find the live page here.