Political Push Card

In spring 2018, a UX designer working on a local campaign of politician running for city council reached out to me because the content on their flyer wasn’t resonating with users. The team had put off revising the content until the last minute, which gave me only a window of 24 hours to help them. Here is the original content:

“The City Manager and City Staff are Alexandria’s professional managers; City Council must be its leaders.  At its core, leadership requires: having the courage to make the right choices rather than expedient ones, engaging Alexandrians to build a vision for the city, and empowering Alexandrians to achieve that vision."

34-year Navy veteran, published author, and professor of leadership at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, Matt is a lifelong public servant.  Visiting Alexandria for the first time prior to joining the service in 1978, he fell in love with the city.  After many years of deployments around the world, he bought a house and found community here.  Recently retired from the navy, Matt is ready to serve the place he gladly calls home – Alexandria.

At first, I researched the politician’s website to understand his policies and the overall tone of the campaign, and I read news articles to gain a better understanding of the local issues that voters cared about. Then, I started revising the actual content. I changed long and unnecessarily complex words to help the readability of the flyer. For example, I changed the phrase “the right choices rather than expedient ones” to “to make the right choices, not convenient ones.”

Despite having just a few hours to complete this project, I did a quick A/B test. I gave copies of the original and revised content to a group of people (all with varying gender, ethnicities, and ages). This test confirmed people preferred the revision. One of the users commented on how the flyer pushed the politician’s military experience too much. I knew the military experience was a key point to highlight, so I left the reference in two places and removed the third reference—“Recently retired from the navy”—to avoid emphasizing it too much. The campaign team liked my rewording. However, the project was rushed, so I wasn’t able to revise the content together with the design team. In the future, working together would have produced even better results.

Hover over image to highlight my revisions.