LAN 4 VOTE — HERO SCENE

Lan 4 Vote

Role
UI/UX Designer, Lead
Studio
Peculiar Labs
Timeline
April – June 2023
Category
Civic tech · Elections
Year
2023

Practice, fail, and learn. Before it counts.

"Lan 4 Vot" was a mobile app we designed and built at Peculiar Labs to simulate the voting experience in Sierra Leone. Its name, from the local Krio language, means "Learn To Vote", chosen for simplicity and memorability.

It addresses the issue of high void votes during elections, often caused by voters meeting the process for the first time in the ballot box. The goal was to familiarise voters, especially first-timers, with the procedure, in the hope of reducing void votes.

It does this through a practice-oriented approach: users learn from their mistakes in a risk-free environment. Void votes were a problem especially seen in past elections in the country.

In short

Built pro-bono at Peculiar Labs and shipped to the Android store in 2023, by a team of young people who found a problem in their own community.

It did not get the downloads we hoped for.

The challenge

A lot of citizens don't experience voting until they're at the polling station, where a mistake can't be undone.

The National Electoral Commission (NEC) puts in a lot of PR and marketing to sensitise the population about the voting process each election. Regardless, the last two elections still saw a high turnout of void votes.

We wanted to complement NEC's efforts, but in a more digital way. Sierra Leone has a youthful population, so our approach at Peculiar Labs was to go about it with a mobile app: one where a user could simulate voting, get acquainted with what the ballots looked like, and experience the process realistically and interactively.

  • High turnout of void votes across the last two elections
  • First-time voters meet the ballot for the first time in the booth
  • Mistakes in the ballot box cannot be undone
  • Pro-bono build, shipped to the Android store

The decisions.

01

Make the ballot feel like the real thing

Context

Void votes were driven by unfamiliarity: voters encountering the process for the first time in the ballot box. For the home screen, the interface had to be instantly recognisable as the real ballot.

Options considered

  • Match the polling-day ballot-paper format, using real images of the candidates and their political parties

The call

We built the home screen in the same format as the ballot papers on polling day, with real candidate and party imagery, all to get the user familiar with what the actual process would look like.

Outcome

Users practised on a ballot that mirrored what they'd actually see on polling day.

02

A Practice, Fail and Learn approach

Context

Sierra Leone has a youthful population, and citizens don't experience voting until they're at the polling station, where first-time voters especially suffer, because mistakes can't be undone.

Options considered

  • Let users vote, fail freely, and learn from feedback in a risk-free simulation

The call

We committed to a Practice, Fail and Learn approach: a way to increase voter competence, confidence and preparedness. Users could vote, get it wrong, and learn from the app's feedback rather than in the booth.

Evidence

The whole process could be simulated and made educational: users could not only vote, but have votes evaluated, fail freely, and learn from failure.

Outcome

Every possible voting scenario became something a user could safely rehearse and understand.

03

Model every voting scenario, valid and void

Context

A vote can be valid (one candidate marked properly), out-of-bounds invalid (the mark touches or crosses a line), or invalid for multiple candidates (more than one candidate marked). Each rule voids a ballot differently.

Options considered

  • Build and evaluate all three flows in-app, with feedback for each outcome

The call

We built all three flows: a proper single mark evaluates to a valid vote and a success screen; a mark touching a line is out-of-bounds invalid and redirects to a reference page; more than one candidate is a multiple-candidate invalid vote. Users could see and learn which scenarios counted as valid or invalid.

Outcome

Users learned the difference between a valid and a void vote before it ever counted.

The results

Studio:
Peculiar Labs
UI/UX lead:
Theodore Rogers
Team:
Ing Obinna A. Browne · Tindae Feika
Flutter:
Amry Samuels · Samuel B. Koroma

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ShippedLive on the Android store
Pro-bonoBuilt in service of the community
3Voting scenarios simulated

Reflection

A real need, a beautiful build. And a hard lesson in reach.

Building Lan 4 Vot at Peculiar Labs was a beautiful experience for the whole team: a group of young, enthusiastic people who found a problem in our community and tried to solve it in our own way. Getting it shipped to the Android store and accessible to users was a real win: we had designed, built and shipped a pro-bono project to inform and educate citizens about the voting process.

It wasn't met with the reception we'd hoped for: 50+ downloads where we expected hundreds. We took that on the chin, but we know there was a real need, and we had built a beautiful, functional app.

So we're leaving it out there. It will be iterated on: more features than the first version for the next elections, with proper marketing behind it. We were not going to let that stop us. Still on a mission.

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