Technology and advancement have reshaped every facet of society, including our electoral processes. Campaigns are investing and undertaking more than ever before in history. Expanding financial resources drive billions of voter interactions each election cycle. Campaigns now possess more effective methods for scaling outreach strategies and provide volunteers and donors with more streamlined avenues to offer their time and finances. Campaign teams have adjusted to significant shifts in media and social media environments, utilizing data analysis to predict voter participation and behavior.

Yet in spite of these unparalleled investments in energizing voters, overall confidence in electoral integrity, democratic institutions, voter satisfaction, and electoral participation has considerably diminished. What could we be overlooking?

In software development, the principle of user experience (UX) is essential in the creation of any product or service. It’s a means to comprehensively consider how a user engages with technology. It ensures that products and services are designed with the users’ genuine needs, actions, and expectations in mind, rather than what developers assume users desire. UX facilitates informed choices based on user interaction with the system, resulting in enhanced design, more effective solutions, and greater user satisfaction. Well-executed UX design leads to straightforward, relevant, valuable, and positive experiences. Conversely, poor UX design results in dissatisfied users.

This is not typically how we envision elections. Campaigns assess success through immediate outputs—voter interactions, fundraising figures, issue surveys, ad exposure—and, ultimately, election outcomes. They rarely analyze how individuals experience this as a single, complex, democratic process. Each campaign, PAC, nonprofit, and volunteer organization may concentrate on its own objectives, but voters experience everything simultaneously. By the time they stand in line to vote, they’ve been inundated with a barrage of outreach—unsolicited messages from unknown candidates, organizers lacking local connections, cumbersome voter registration platforms, inconsistent information, and confusing communications, even from campaigns they support. Political teams may reference data that justifies this onslaught, yet the impact of voter outreach has been consistently declining since 2008. Intuitively, we recognize this approach carries long-term consequences. To tackle this issue, let’s examine the UX of an election cycle from the perspective of the end user, the everyday citizen.

Specifically, how can we articulate the UX of an election cycle: the voter experience (VX)? A VX perspective could illuminate the full ramifications of the electoral cycle from the viewpoint that matters most: the voters’.

For instance, what if we approached elections with considerations like these?

• How do voters navigate an election cycle, from initiation to conclusion?
• How do voters view their interactions with political campaigns?
• What elements of the election cycle do voters appreciate? What do they find frustrating? Do citizens currently feel satisfied by the voting process?
• If voters “tune out” of politics, what components of the process have motivated them to disengage?
• What experiences lower the number of eligible citizens who register and cast votes?
• Can we accurately assess the cumulative effects of political content interactions across multiple election cycles?
• Can polls or focus groups aid researchers in understanding longitudinal sentiment from citizens as they navigate several election cycles?
• If so, what insights would we seek to enhance democratic participation and confidence in institutions?

Reflecting in terms of VX could assist in addressing these inquiries. Furthermore, researching and designing around VX could uncover additional metrics, beyond conventional turnout and engagement statistics, that more accurately encapsulate the collective influence of campaigning: of all those voter outreach and persuasion efforts combined.

This isn’t an entirely novel concept, and previous efforts to integrate UX design into electoral initiatives have yielded encouraging early outcomes. In 2020, a coalition of political technology creators established a Volunteer Experience program. The group conducted design sprints for political tech tools, such as canvassing applications and phone banking platforms. Their aim was to apply UX principles to enhance the volunteer user experience, improve data quality, and increase volunteer retention. If a few sprints can refine the phone banking experience, consider the transformative potential of applying this lens to the VX as a whole.

If we want democracy to endure over the long haul, we must think beyond immediate victories and basic requirements. This isn’t about substituting grassroots organizing or civic engagement with digital tools. Rather, it’s about leveraging insights from UX research methodologies to cultivate lasting, meaningful engagement that intertwines both technology and community organizing. Frequently, it is indeed local, on-the-ground organizers who have been vocal about the long-term ramifications of prioritizing short-term strategies. A VX approach may provide additional evidence to support their claims.

Insights from a VX assessment of election cycles could also inform the creation of new initiatives that not only mobilize voters (to contribute, campaign for their candidates, and cast their votes), but also guarantee that the entire process of voting, post-election follow-up, and broader civic involvement is as accessible, intuitive, and satisfying as possible. Enhanced voter UX will cultivate more politically engaged citizens and elevate voter turnout.

VX methodology may facilitate the integration of real-time citizen feedback with centralized decision-making. Looking beyond election cycles, concentrating on the citizen UX could expedite avenues for citizens to provide immediate feedback, assess the performance of elected officials and government, and receive help-desk-style assistance with the same level of simplicity as other everyday “products.” By comprehending how individuals engage with civic life over time, we can better develop systems for citizens that fortify participation, trust, and accountability at every tier.

Our aspiration is that this method, along with the new data and metrics it reveals, will support transitions that help reinvigorate civic participation and bolster trust in institutions. With citizens positioned as the primary users of our democratic frameworks, we can establish new best practices for sustaining civic infrastructure that promotes a more effective and inclusive democracy.

The moment for this is now. Despite hard-fought achievements and lessons gleaned from setbacks, many individuals working in politics privately concede a challenging truth: our current methods are failing. Every two years, teams build campaigns, mobilize voters, and stimulate engagement, yet they are hindered by what they fail to grasp about the long-term impacts of their efforts. VX thinking can contribute to resolving that.

This essay was co-authored with Hillary Lehr and originally published on the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s website.