Escribe
we need a way for citizens to view state meetings in order to stay informed of important changes and decisions being made within their community.
bACKGROUND
eScribe is a company that provides software and resources to clients in the public sector needing to publicize their meetings and decisions. Their main goal is to encourage transparency between these two groups.
USER GROUP
The user group we targeted in this project are citizens and organizations who engage with the public sector and who wish to stay informed about civil and state meetings.
understanding escribe
We started by listing every interaction with eScribe’s existing interface to get an idea of what we needed to design. However, once we had completed our flowchart we realized that we had made it too complicated. We made the decision to simplify it to its core functions to improve readability and narrow down the essential functions of the interface.
We narrowed eScribe’s application down to a handful of key functions: A calendar, comprehensive filter, conflict registry, and search function, all of which are tools that are used to find and view meetings.
We attended and observed city council meetings and conducted contextual inquiries.
We conducted competitive analysis to identify the strengths and weaknesses of both eScribe and its competitors.
Design ProcesS
We wanted to understand our user group and the needs of our client so we had a solid idea of what to design and how to design it.
We found that eScribe’s strength were its comprehensive yet simple filters, which allowed users to quickly search meetings based on their wants and needs. However, other companies outclassed eScribe in usability, featuring a less complicated layout and UI.
Our observations revealed that our user group encompassed a wide variety of people and, as a result, many individuals attend or watch these meetings for many different reasons.
PROTOTYPING
We decided to narrow down to two different goals: improving the usability of eScribe’s existing user interface, and focusing our new design around eScribe’s filter system to provide users with as much agency as possible.
FINAL SOLUTION:
Users should be able to find meetings they want to listen to easily through the tools that eScribe provides them. By providing them the ability to filter by timeframe, relevancy, and several other categories, we believe that we’ve managed to come up with a design that does its job well.
final design
We designed over existing infrastructure and interface, modernizing it in order to maintain functionality while improving aesthetics, readability and information hierarchy.
We placed an emphasis on the design of the filter as dictated by our contextual inquiries and observations. We tried to keep it comprehensive but readable and easy to use.
Search function
Meeting video player, including an interactive transcript, meeting minutes, agenda, and comment section. The search function can be used to filter through each section.
