SC Legislature
Revitalizing Legislative Tracking
Challenge
The South Carolina State House website wasn’t built for mobile users, and though a basic mobile version existed, it lacked support for the growing demand for mobile access. A website redesign to accommodate these issues wasn’t possible due to limited resources.
Role
Web/Interactive Designer
Tools
Figma
Solution
Partner with a local studio, 52inc., to develop a native mobile app that can serve as a mobile version of our website and take advantage of mobile technologies. We didn’t want to simply reproduce our website, but wanted to make our content more accessible and personalized to users.
Impact
Features
Legislation Tracking
Personalized Screens
Quick Search
Process
The main question that sparked the idea of creating a mobile app was, "How do we enhance our mobile experience?"
Our initial plan was to simply update the mobile site. However, the challenge was that our main site is not responsive, which made the task more complicated. We were faced with two options: completely revamp the mobile site and leave it non-responsive, which could make it feel disconnected from our main site and potentially confuse users, or fully redesign our entire website to make it responsive. The latter would involve reworking hundreds, possibly thousands, of pages and would take significant development resources, causing delays in other important tasks.
The current main page for the state house and its mobile site.
We ultimately decided that building a mobile application, separate from the existing site, was the best path forward. It gave us the opportunity to introduce a fresh design, take advantage of mobile features like push notifications, and deliver a more personalized experience even without requiring users to sign in. It also made it easier to work with an external studio that already had experience in native app development.
Before selecting a studio, we planned to conduct our own research and define a clear scope of features and functionality. While we would not be building the app ourselves, the final product would still reflect our vision.
Audience + Challenges
The audience for this app consists of 3 types of users: General Public/Constituents, Members of the General Assembly, Staff, and Lobbyists and the Business Community of South Carolina.
The challenge was to not simply reproduce the website in the form of a mobile app, but to make our content more accessible to users based on what’s important to them.
Discovery + Research
With those goals in mind, we gathered information on applications already available as well as from our own website. We started with looking at mobile apps from other state legislatures and felt they left a lot to be desired. many of them served very few functions and weren't visually appealing either. In total we found 7 states with their own mobile applications. Florida had the most robust of the group, but it did not serve a strong foundation for us visually. Most apps seemed like they had just 1 or 2 things that you could just as easily go to google or their website and do without downloading anything.
We wanted to make sure our app felt like it was actually worth downloading and would really improve the lives of our users.
Next we looked at our own website. Using the Google Analytics data from our website I found our most visited pages and the paths they were typically taking to get there. What I found was that most users are interested in finding their local legislators and what they're up to. A lot of the traffic on our website was internal, so a lot of people are simply doing their jobs, and a lot of visitors are viewing the Code of Laws. This was a key point of interest for our director, as he has friends in law enforcement who often need quick access to the Code of Laws.
Findings
No current applications offered live streaming or video archives of sessions
Applications tended to offer either legislative tracking or legislator information, not often both
Rarely did these applications follow a design system
Most web users were interested in searches and their legislators
High staff portal usage indicates a large portion of traffic is internal
High correlation between finding legislators and multi-criteria search
Code of laws is one of the most visited pages
Design
With that initial info we began the wireframing process. We started with a white boarding session. Our whiteboard was actually just a table with a big laminated sheet spread across it. After that I took the broad idea we had and turned it into a slightly more defined wireframe. Initial user flows were nearly identical to the website so they would feel familiar, but as mentioned earlier, we did want to elevate this experience more than just a mobile version of the website. Familiarity doesn’t always mean better for the users.
That’s when I had the idea that we should lean more into the personalized experience that mobile apps are known for. From that, we came up with the concept of transforming the homepage into something closer to a timeline feed. This approach would give users one place to see upcoming meetings and check their notifications. Stakeholders on my side were fairly insistent on including state house imagery within the app, especially on the homepage, to match the website’s aesthetic—even when it didn’t add functionality. So the designer from 52inc and I were able to find a middle ground by introducing a carousel that highlights key moments like House and Senate live streams, start times, and bill-related data visualizations.
The second major improvement extended beyond just the mobile app. With the other designer’s experience, we were able to take the broader visual guidelines I had created within the agency and evolve them into something more robust for the mobile design. One example was our bill status display. I had originally scaled it back for the main website, but now we had the opportunity to modernize it for mobile, which ended up serving as a strong reference point for future upgrades. It also gave us an early look at how things might evolve with a major website redesign.
Prototype + Testing
Our in-house development team tested the application in an Invision prototype before approving it for development.
Once completed, the application soft launched to a test userbase for ~4 months. The test users comprised of people from the Senate, House and Staff ranging from the ages of 20s to 60s with varying technological literacy. The main goal was to see how the application would perform with real data since so much information is being processed during the busy legislative session.
Release
SC Legislature was released shortly before legislative session began accompanied by a foldout brochure and a webpage to advertise its release. In the first 3 months of its release over 500k push notifications were issued to users. The application is highly regarded among congress members for its ease of use and functionality and garnered attention from local news outlets. It still maintains a high rating within both app stores.
