SC Legislature
Transforming complex legislative data into an accessible mobile experience, enabling users to track bills, follow representatives, and stay engaged with government activity
Context
What is SC Legislature?
SC Legislature is the official iOS and Android app of the South Carolina Legislature. Built by the Legislative Services Agency in partnership with local development studio 52inc., it gives constituents and legislators mobile access to legislative information from the State House website, along with livestreams, video archives, bill activity, meeting updates, and notifications about ongoing changes.
Impact
My Role
I served as the interactive designer on this project, leading the design of core mobile flows and screen-level experiences across the app. All screens shown here are my original designs, with visual design developed in collaboration with a designer from 52inc.
The team included about 10 engineers, 2 designers, and a project manager, working in a waterfall process. Strategy was shaped in collaboration with LSA leadership and the development team.
Features
Making legislative activity easier to follow
Tracking legislation on the main State House website was cumbersome. Users either had to repeatedly search for bills they cared about or create an account and manage them there, which made staying informed feel more manual than it needed to be. The process relied too heavily on users remembering what to check and returning often enough to catch updates.
I wanted the app to make that process feel more continuous and less dependent on memory. From an individual bill page, users could follow a bill directly and receive push notifications as activity changed. Those updates also surfaced in the home feed, creating a clearer connection between discovery, tracking, and ongoing engagement. Instead of asking users to repeatedly re-enter the same information, the app took on more of that work for them.
Creating a more relevant home experience
Before the app, there was no real way for users to receive most legislative information in a way that felt personal to them. They had to navigate the main website, which already suffered from poor information architecture, and piece together the updates they cared about on their own.
I approached the home experience as a personalized feed shaped by what users chose to follow. Bills, representatives, and topics could all influence the content shown on the homepage, allowing recent activity to feel more timely and useful. For new users, the app introduced the idea that they could subscribe to the parts of government activity most relevant to them. For returning users, that same structure made the experience feel more focused and useful over time.
Improving access to law in the field
Accessing South Carolina law through the website could be frustrating in the field, where connectivity was not always reliable and load times could slow people down. That made it harder to quickly reference information in situations where speed mattered, including for users like law enforcement working away from a stable connection.
To make that experience more dependable, I designed a Quick Search feature that allowed users to download searchable sections of either the Code of Laws or Code of Regulations. This gave users faster, more portable access to important legal information, even when they were offline or in low-connectivity situations.
Process
The project began with a simple question: how could the South Carolina Legislature create a better mobile experience?
The existing State House website was not built for mobile users, and while a basic mobile version existed, it could not support the kind of experience we wanted to create. Any meaningful update would have required either a separate mobile site that felt disconnected from the main website or a much larger overhaul of the broader platform. Neither path made sense within the time and resource constraints of the project.
The current main page for the State House website and its mobile site.
Building a native mobile app became the clearest path forward. It created space for a fresh design, made mobile-specific features like push notifications possible, and allowed the experience to feel more personal even without requiring users to sign in. More importantly, it gave us the opportunity to make legislative information more accessible instead of simply reproducing the website on a smaller screen.
Before selecting a studio, we conducted our own research and defined a clear scope for the app’s core features and functionality. While we would not be building the app ourselves, the product still needed to reflect our vision and priorities.
Audience + Challenges
The app needed to serve several distinct groups: constituents, members of the General Assembly, staff, lobbyists, and the broader South Carolina business community.
The challenge was to make legislative information more accessible based on what different users actually needed most.
Discovery + Research
With that goal in mind, I looked at both existing legislative apps and our own website data. We reviewed mobile apps from other state legislatures first and found that most of them were limited in scope and visually underdeveloped. In total, I found seven states with their own mobile apps. Florida’s app was the most robust, but even it did not provide a particularly strong visual or product model. Most of the apps we reviewed only offered one or two useful functions, often things users could just as easily do through Google or directly on a website without needing to download an app at all.
That made it important for our app to feel genuinely worth downloading and clearly more useful than the mobile web experience.
From there, I turned to our own website. Using Google Analytics, I identified the most visited pages and the paths users were taking to reach them. What I found was that many users were primarily interested in locating their legislators and following what they were doing. A large share of traffic was also internal, reflecting staff usage, and one of the most visited sections of the site was the Code of Laws. That was a major point of interest for our director, who specifically called out the need for faster legal reference in the field, including for law enforcement.
Findings
No existing state legislature apps we reviewed offered live streaming or video archives
Most apps offered either bill tracking or legislator information, but rarely both
Few of them showed any real design-system consistency
On our website, users were most often trying to search, find legislators, and follow legislative activity
High staff portal usage suggested a significant share of traffic was internal
Users looking for legislators often relied on multi-criteria search
The Code of Laws was one of the most visited sections of the site
Design
With the initial research in place, we moved into wireframing. We started with a collaborative whiteboarding session, then I translated those early ideas into more defined wireframes. The first flows stayed close to the website so the experience would feel familiar, but the goal was always to make the app more useful than a simple mobile version of the site. Familiarity was a starting point, not the end state.
That led to one of the most important shifts in the project: leaning into the more personalized experience users expect from mobile apps. From that, the homepage evolved into something closer to a timeline feed, giving users a central place to see upcoming meetings, follow activity, and review notifications. Stakeholders on my side were also fairly insistent on including State House imagery to reflect the website’s visual identity, even when it did not add functional value. The designer from 52inc. and I found a middle ground by introducing a carousel that could highlight moments like House and Senate livestreams, start times, and bill-related visualizations without overwhelming the core experience.
The second major improvement extended beyond the app itself. Working with the other designer, we were able to take the broader visual guidelines I had established within the agency and evolve them into a more robust system for mobile. One example was the bill status display. I had previously simplified it for the website, but mobile gave us room to modernize it in a way that became a useful reference point for future product updates and a broader website redesign.
Prototype + Testing
Our in-house development team tested the experience through an InVision prototype before approving it for development.
After development, the app soft-launched to a test group for about four months. That group included members of the Senate, House, and staff across a wide range of ages and levels of technical familiarity. Because the app processes so much live legislative information during session, the goal was to validate how it performed with real data under real conditions.
Release
SC Legislature launched shortly before the legislative session, supported by a foldout brochure and a dedicated webpage announcing the release. In the first three months, the app sent more than 500,000 push notifications. It was well received by legislators for its usability and functionality, attracted local news coverage, and continues to maintain a strong rating across both app stores.
