Pushthought: Branding and Personas

The Challenge: Making impactful political change involves a lot of effort. One of the most effective ways to make a difference and incite a response is to contact your political representatives in the House and Senate, but this  involves finding the correct reps, finding their individual websites, and filling out each contact form separately with no clue of anyone else following this same process.

Solving for: Minimally tech-savvy individuals who want an easy way to have their voice heard.

Role: UX interaction designer and visual designer, working with Pushthought founder 

In this politically divisive time, many people find themselves wanting to have an impact on political decisions but don't have an accessible, low-effort outlet to do so. Petitions are one option, but are hard to connect to real change. Petition signers are not always correlated with a political district, which is what makes their voice valuable to their representative. Additionally, each petition stands on it's own, meaning that signatures on multiple petitions about the same issue are counted only on their petition, not as a sum across like-minded petitions. Users could find their representatives and then navigate to their websites to send a message, but this involves a lot of friction and again gives no sense of community.

Our goal with Pushthought is to provide an easy way for users to have their opinion heard and feel like they are part of a group trying to make a difference, instead of just being one voice sent out into oblivion. The website is up and running in beta on pushthought.com, and I am currently working with the founder to completely redesign the UX interaction design, information architecture, branding, and visual design.

Working with the Pushthought founder, we created 4 personas: one politically active 'campaign creator,' two 'message senders' with varying levels of time and political activism, and a 'message receiver' working in a congressional office. We based the personas on individuals that the founder knew in his time working as the co-producer of a political podcast, for which he interviewed political activists, congressional staffers, and politically engaged citizens. View the full persona descriptions with the link below:

After creating personas, the founder and I created a user journey map for what we assumed to be our most common user - Beth Holiday, a young, less-engaged message sender. 

As the Pushthought experience involves layers of interaction between the user and political staff, as well as between the user visibility and backend functions, we felt that it would benefit our process to get a clear view of how all these pieces fit together. To get this perspective, we created the service blueprint shown below.

With the personas, user journey, and service blueprint assets to guide our process, we then embarked on our branding effort. The brand values we identified are as follows: 

Progressive, simple, idealistic, rebellious, refreshing, fun, approachable, modern, local, accessible, friendly, trustworthy, disruptive, accepting, modern, thoughtful, community based.

The user should feel a sense of accomplishment, walking away feeling as though they have made an impact. They should feel as though they belong to an active community, which is full of hope, inspiration, and optimism.

The content on the website should be encouraging, suggestive without being overbearing, knowledgeable, and welcoming to users as a friend more than a colleague.

Our audience is anyone active on social media, specifically millenials, who are at all levels of political activity.

With these values in mind, I created 3 mood boards so that the founder could choose a visual direction. 

These mood boards helped to clarify how to move forward visually. The founder chose Option 2, with some modifications to emphasize a community aspect and move away from a 'fun' aesthetic. With the revised mood board shown below, I created a style guide to specify voice and tone, color palette, typography, logo, and imagery to be used on Pushthought.