Civic Design Skills

Start with the Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent for a broad overview of our core design principles. Then dive deeper into different skills with curated reading lists.

Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent

This 10-volume collection covers it all. Each volume introduces practical design guidelines that election officials can really use, based on solid research and best practices. Each field guide dives into a specific piece of election material, including ballots, websites, and forms, but the lessons can be applied more broadly.

Plain Language

Plain language means that readers can find what they need, understand what they find, and use the information. Whether we’re designing a form or writing content for a website, we’re always making sure to integrate plain language.

Accessibility

At its heart, accessibility means “usable by more people.” At CCD, we design for voters, poll workers, and election administrators with the widest possible range of attitudes, aptitudes, and abilities. That means including people with low literacy and mild cognitive issues, people with low English proficiency, and people with mobility and dexterity challenges, low vision, and blindness.

Usability Testing

Usability testing is a tool for learning where people interacting with a design – such as a ballot – encounter frustration, and translating what you see and hear to make a better design that will eliminate those frustrations. At its essence, usability testing is a simple technique: Watch and listen to people who are like your voters as they use a design as they normally would. And then use those insights to improve your design.

Info Design

When you communicate with someone, you are designing information to cause an action. Sometimes, this action is as simple as learning something new. Other times, the action might be more complicated, like registering to vote. Information design is the process of making the information you want to share clear, engaging, accessible, and usable.