Overview
The Local Bills Tracker is an interactive web tool designed to provide real-time updates on local legislation. It offers a clear and accessible way for the public to track bills as they progress through legislative stages.
Problem
Tracking legislative progress is complex, with multiple stages including committee reviews, House and Senate votes, and final approval. Many existing tools are cluttered and lack intuitive visualization.
Outcome
The Local Bills Tracker successfully enhances legislative transparency by providing a clear, interactive, and user-friendly tool for tracking bill progress. It increased civic engagement, with 40% higher user interaction and improved accessibility to legislative updates.
UX Designer (Me)
1x Editorial manager , & 1x Developers
Context
Timeline
Feb 25’ - (2 weeks)
Team
Tools
Figma, Figjam
Legislation tracking experience
IDS News (Legislation)
Figma, Figjam
Our goal was to design a tool that simplifies this process, providing clarity and ease of access to legislative updates.
Background
IDS News wanted to offer civic engagement tool that simplifies legislative tracking by providing real-time updates, clear progress visualization, and direct access to related coverage
Understanding local legislation is crucial for civic engagement. However, legislative processes are often opaque, making it difficult for citizens to track a bill’s progress.
Problem space
Tracking legislative progress is complex, with multiple stages including committee reviews, House and Senate votes, and final approval. Many existing tools are cluttered and lack intuitive visualization.
Business Goal
Reimagine the legislative tracking experience by transforming complex policy updates into a clear, accessible tool that empowers citizens, journalists, and policymakers to stay informed and engaged with local governance.
Difficulty in understanding bill statuses
Lack of centralized information
No intuitive visual representation of progress
Solution Highlights
The Local Bills Tracker offers a simple yet effective user experience through:
Bill Overview card. Each bill has a dedicated card with a short description and links to related coverage.
Progress Indicators: A visual representation of each bill’s journey, utilizing a progress bar that updates dynamically.
Introducing a dynamic and intuitive progress visualisation of process was one of our OKR’s to increase engagement
Bill --> Process to view bill history
Introducing a right sidebar
mirrors processes which has the possibility
to be repeated is represented clearly.
Table of Contents: An at-a-glance summary of all tracked bills, allowing quick navigation.
Section 1
Research Summary
Understanding the Legislative Process
We analyzed local legislative procedures and interviewed political analysts to determine the best way to represent bill progression.
The team had a wealth of research data but lacked a clear product vision for tracking local legislation. To define a direction, I helped plan a sprint with our cross-functional team, focusing on user pain points and opportunities for an improved bill-tracking experience.
Understanding Current Legislative Tracking. We analysed how users, journalists, policymakers, and engaged citizens—navigate existing bill tracking systems.
High level Audit. Collaborating with the product manager and engineers, we conducted a thorough evaluation of existing tracking tools.
User engagement levels with bill-tracking platforms
Technical feasibility of automated bill status updates
impact of developing a new interface
Our vision & Goals. Based on our
findings from the sprint, along with the
product manager, I crafted a preliminary
vision and roadmap that emphasized 5 crucial areas to focus.
Unified Tracking Experience
Simplified Interface
Integrated News & Context
Mobile accessibility
Design & Iterations
High-level compilation of the design
explorations, and iterations we navigated in
designing the IDS Legislation bill tracker.
As multiple new capabilities
were slated to be introduced
in the redesign, we explored
developing a bespoke layout.
Before — Scattered user actions & overwhelming layout
Layout & IA Exploration
After — Declutter and Intuitive layout.
We wanted to simplify the layout and unify IA based on the functions and user actions. The left- top bar (a) is now dedicated exclusively to the table of contents of the project. The top toolbar (b) is designed for keeping track of the bill’s process of the bill, while the floating properties (c) is the bills overview
a
b
c
Bill card overview
Creation
Library pane with
limited real-estate for
the new use case
Quick Navigation
Under utilized with just
transform options
Bill process
Exhaustive Editing
capabilities for the
new use case
Content
Top panel with
multiple stacked
contents.
Impact & Retrospective
Throughout this project, I wore multiple hats,
single handedly owning UX design from start to finish within a small team. I got to life the IDS Legislative tracker, a complex space into an intuitive platform, using research to prioritize elements.
Some key accomplishments include:
Increased User Adoption on IDS webpage. By designing the legislation tracker from scratch into a user-friendly platform, we saw a 50% increase in page viewing rates among student journalists, validating the success of our design efforts.
Broadened Market Reach: The intuitive design and reduced
learning curve attracted non-expert users, expanding our user
base beyond just article readers to more journalists and policymakers come to the tracker.
