Announcing a redesign of the Vote Forward dashboard
We’ve updated the design of the dashboard to improve your experience.
We’ve redesigned the Vote Forward Dashboard to make managing a lot of letters even easier.
The main change you’ll notice is that voters you adopt will now be grouped into bundles. So, for example, if you adopt 20 voters, you’ll see those 20 voters grouped together. You can still expand the bundle to see the individual voters within the bundle when the need arises.
We hope this will make the web-based parts of the Vote Forward experience easier, especially for those of you who routinely work with hundreds or thousands of letters.
Background
When we built the first version of the Vote Forward website, we thought that a typical volunteer might write five or 20 or maybe a few batches of letters.
We didn’t anticipate that so many of you would wind up writing thousands or even tens of thousands of letters, in collaboration with groups of friends, family, and neighbors.
The old version of the dashboard was able to accommodate those situations, but didn't handle them gracefully. There were major difficulties generating PDFs and manipulating the statuses (“prepared” and “sent”) of large groups of letters.
Our process
We were aware of these issues over the last few years and were able to make some tweaks to improve the user experience over that period. But we knew there was a need for a more comprehensive overhaul.
So in 2022, we conducted a series of interviews with volunteers who were able to speak to a range of needs and preferences. We used what we learned in those interviews to develop a new design that we believe will address the key issues.
We began working on the software engineering to realize that design last year, and have put the final touches on it in the last few weeks.
The new design
The main new thing you’ll notice is the grouping of voters into bundles. Each distinct click of the ‘adopt [x] voters’ button will create one of these bundles.
So in one sense, this won’t feel like that big of a change. But by reworking this basic pattern, we have also unlocked some significant additional improvements:
Bundle details
Bundles on the dashboard will now incorporate details including:
when they were adopted
which campaign they were adopted from
the mail date
how many voters they contain
Bundle status manipulation
You’ll be able to manipulate the statuses of bundles as a group. So if you’ve completed a batch of five or 20 letters, you can easily mark just those letters “prepared”.
You can also still download and manipulate the statuses of individual letters by “expanding” a bundle if you need to. This can be useful, for instance, if you need to re-download a letter on which you’ve made an error.
Search And filter
You can now search your dashboard by voter name, campaign name, or bundle identifier, causing the display to show only the bundles and voters who match your search criteria.
This can be useful if you have many bundles and want to find which bundle contains a specific voter, or if you’ve marked some of the voters within a bundle “prepared” and want to see just that bundle isolated from the others.
Bundle identifiers
Each bundle now has an identifier that appears on the dashboard itself, in the filename of each PDF download, and on the cover page of the printed bundle.
We think this will make it much easier to keep track of letters in group settings like letter parties. It will also help the dedicated team of volunteers who field incoming questions to better assist you when the occasion arises.
Downloading improvements
We’ve added more informative status updates for bundle downloads, so you can see more clearly which ones are in-progress, and which have finished, as well as more informative error messages in case a download fails.
Larger bundles
We’ve added an ability for volunteers with the appropriate permissions (“super volunteers,” as we call them) to adopt bundles of 100 and 500 voters at a time.
A note of gratitude
This kind of change requires a lot of effort and attention to detail. We’re proud of the efforts of our team members who brought this project to fruition, and grateful to the volunteers who provided critical feedback on their letter writing experiences, and the generous donors who have made it possible for us to sustain this effort!