The Concept

AusPoll is a mobile app and system to help connect Australian citizens and voters with their federal and state representatives, their government bodies and the working of all levels of government. AusPoll also acts as a way to accurately measure the performance of individual representatives, parties and government bodies as well as the support of Australian citizens.

The Purpose

This concept is a personal project aimed at helping to solve many of the ongoing arguments and problems with how people connect with their democracy and understand the real facts of its operation and its people. Whilst The Australian democracy isn’t as problematic as other nation’s, I believe this is a way we can enhance the way citizens can connect with their representatives and provide their input to the way the government works and how their representatives vote.

The feed is the landing page of the app, allowing users to view posts and updates from representatives and politicians they follow, their local representative, government bodies and topics of interest. The feed has a priority algorithm presenting posts and authors to the user with the highest priority first.

The Bills & legislation screen provides users with a feed of upcoming and past proposals before House of Representatives and the Senate. Users can interact with each card and view it’s status, controversy level and details. For more important bills, users can see a report in user friendly terms going through the for and against arguments as well as statements by key politicians in the discussion.

AusPoll Review provides users with a report on important or controversial pieces of bills and legislation in layman’s terms. The aim is to help break down the barrier between citizens and their understanding of the activities of government.

Heartbeat shows how citizens respond to the piece of legislation. The data is gathered in app by asking users a series of questions on the topic of the bill and legislation to understand the positive or negative feelings of it.

Bills and legislation are measured by the controversy attached to them, both inside government by politicians and outside by the public. Higher controversy pieces will be provided additional resources to ensure clarity and understanding.

The Heartbeat is a way of measuring the positive or negative attitudes and responses of citizens towards the government, its operations and activities. The Heartbeat is a more informative way of responding to the need, successes and failures of polls today. The Heartbeat is determined by a series of indirect and direct questions presented to users in-app.

Whilst most users will only receive polls whilst using the app, some inactive users or those users who have opted in to be polled directly will receive push notification reminders to answer poll questions

Users will see this screen infrequently, but will become used to either seeing a request on their feed to complete a poll or be intentionally interrupted whilst browsing the app.

To ensure continued support and interaction with polls throughout the app, we want to be transparent with how the data is used and what the outcome is for citizens and for the government.

Being able to follow, see the posts of and interact with politicians, government organisations and research groups is integral to the experience of AusPoll. It allows users to follow trustworthy news sources, see what their local representatives are up to and interact with them on a more human level.

Heartbeat shows how citizens respond to the representative, their approach to the position they hold and how they help share the communities perspective on topics with the wider government.

Representatives, organisations and research agencies are all verified users, they are able to publish posts updating their followers on their activities in their role. 

Vote history allows users to see how their representative voted on a number of bills, legislation and overall issues. The history also helps to display how likely they are to vote with or against their own party on topics they feel strongly about.

AusPoll is a concept in progress and I will be regularly updating this and changing the design as I evolve my thinking, my research and the prospective features. I’m also planning to blog about my process and my progress on this concept.