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 ballot looked like the real ballot
Same format as polling day, real candidate and party imagery, so the practice transferred to the booth.
Failure was the feature
Users could get it wrong in a risk-free environment and learn from the feedback, instead of learning in the one place a mistake cannot be undone.
Every way to void a ballot was rehearsable
A proper mark, a mark touching a line, more than one candidate: all three flows built and evaluated, so the difference between valid and void was learned before it counted.
50+ downloads where we expected hundreds, taken on the chin
The need was real and the build was good; the reach was not. It stays live, and the next election gets the iteration with proper marketing behind it. Still on a mission.
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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