VOTEPH 2025 - Inquirer's election site
Inquirer's highly successful VOTEPH campaign for the 2025 Philippine mid-term election site was a project dedicated to serving Filipino voters through education and information.
Overview
VOTEPH 2022
The previous design of VOTEPH was for 2022's presidential elections. This site featured a tally, regional heatmaps, election-related news, and candidate information.
Previous election site
Problem Space
How can we engage younger voters while being informative?
One of the key goals for the next iteration of VOTEPH would be trying to engage new and younger voters to keep up with election-related news. The goal state included updating the site's visual design and features alongside posting 2 phases for the site that depended on how close elections was.
Competitive analysis
What did we miss out on?
Using python and matplotlib, I created a quadrant graph to see Inquirer's VOTEPH 2022 positioning last election. Research yielded that Inquirer's last election site stayed more traditional and had poor UX, especially when it came to the landing page.
The different axes are on innovation and UX (branding, visuals, breakpoints, and user experience) and on credibility and informational depth (platform trust, voter's education).
user research
Finding our target users and their needs
Using user interviews, content analytics, and social listening (through social media responses), the team determined the targeted user descriptions and needs.
DESIGN SOLUTION previews
Planning for 2025
The company agreed with releasing the site through phases. The site will keep adding more features like a countdown timer for the date of elections, election-related videos, detailed candidate profiles, and a dedicated section too election primers.
The visuals are also updated to help distinguish the site more from competitors and to encourage younger audiences, like first-time voters, to visit the site. Overall, the company wanted the site to make VOTEPH 2025 the prime site to visit on election day.
Sitemap
Phase 1 site map
Phase 2 site map
Phase 2 focuses on lesser features to improve the speed of vote transmission to make sure Inquirer's VOTEPH 2025 will be the first to break the election results.
prototyping and testing
UX sketches and lo-fi prototypes
My practice for this project was to create sketches for every feature or site layout before moving to digital wireframes or prototypes.
Middle-fidelity prototypes were created and focused on the blocking of proposed elements. These designs were also checked by the developers to see if the features were feasible and flexible for election data.
Testing and results
Using user interviews, the testing results showed that straightforward bar charts were the most accessible data visualizations for Filipino voters across all age and social demographics. Candidate information and the election countdown was also appreciated amongst users. The provision for primers and articles were also shown to build trust amongst users.
FINAL DESIGN AND LAUNCH
Final design and findings
The design shown on election day was the Phase 2 of the site, which featured the official election results, local results, precinct information, candidate information, election primers, and relevant election videos.
Key statistics
On the days leading up to election day as well as the election day itself, the site performed very well and achieved impressive metrics such as reaching over 40 million in site visits and social media engagements. The site also became one of the most visited and watched sites during the election week.
+40M
site visitors
in 2-3 months
1ST
site to break
election results
Reflection
Amazing results, but room for improvement
The project was considered a success and I'm very honored to have my design being shared by my fellow countrymen nationwide. I do think that the visuals could've been more straightforward and less color and shape heavy.
At the end of the day, this site should be more dedicated to giving information as quickly as possible. While we did get more young voters interested in looking at our election site, I should have struck a balance between the direct design of the old election site and the visuals of the new site.
