I'm working on trying to get citizens' voices into spaces of power (councils, parliaments...). So far I've been experimenting with scrapping public records and building a solo (and multiplayer) experience for replaying plenary sessions.
Although its true, its meaningful that a country is actually building towards digital voting, as solving this problem will take us closer to more direct forms of democracy. Its crazy that more than 50% of citizens voted online.
There's a good quote [1] from Marten Kaevats (digital advisor to Estonia) on how they do it, and it goes much further than the security of the tech itself:
"The main lesson learnt in building a digital society for the past 25 years in Estonia is that digital government has got very little to do with technology and everything to do with building a mindset and culture for trust."
The idea of these tools is to allow teams to test a wide array of hypothesis to then have data-backed flows that make sense to code efficiently. The size is an unfortunate trade-off for testing speed.
Of course the initial users will experience a slow product, but the idea is to discover faster what a useful product looks like without investing development resources.
Yeah testing is its intended usage, but on the initial phases of the product we did use it as the finished product clients were paying for.
It can be slightly hacked around to add user authentication & analytics, so if you are handling a small amount of users its a really efficient way to iterate fast.
I agree 100%, in the use case I mentioned we were looking to either prove or disprove product hypothesis with real users fast so efficient code wasn't a priority, but rather to confirm wether what we were about to develop was valid.
The actual load per page was around 1-5mb, so even when doing remote mobile testing in areas with low speed internet it wasn't an issue (although its definitely one of the main reasons to switch to a real react site when scaling the product)
I swear I don't work for Framer, but I've been using it very intensively for UX testing and users aren't capable of differentiating the prototypes from the actual real thing:
The prototypes can be heavy on the browser, but once you go past that the immersion level is deep. You can even add custom google analytics events for quant analysis.
You should check it out, because its actually the other way around. Framer is basically React you can tinker with and use actual React components, it just happens to have a great UI on top that makes designing with no code seamless, and whatever you design is React behind the scenes.
Page builders in my experience aren't efficient to design, this on the other hand makes designing easier (as I have access to interactive components, real client data, etc).
You need to have a pro account to use the desktop version and make the export, and as we speak they are refactoring this version to include it in the web version.
On the – non Beta – Desktop version, it works as a single folder file (pretty sizeable, +150mb) that you can host anywhere, and renders the prototype within an iframe.
The team at Farfetch did a custom component to do something similar to what you mention (if I understood you well):
https://youtu.be/LEMGL2NH0r8?t=2760
Framer motion is great, and its integration on the tool makes it deadly simple to use!
I think the export might not be so suited for bigger teams though. For reference, a simple 4-page navigation can lead to a +200mb file export, and its basically HTML within an iframe.
For the team as a whole, I think its more about having the designers speak the same language as devs on a shared interface. It empowers us as it makes exporting prototypes for user testing that can be easily hosted as if they were coded for real, and forces us to focus on interactivity & flows rather than the design per se.
The way design tools are built – Sketch, Figma, XD... – its an added burden. I believe this is the future for collaboration between front-end & UI designers, but I feel it won't have an easy adoption until its tightly integrated in the designer's workflow.
I've recently made the switch to a similar workflow with Framer just a year ago, the difference here being that devs in my team use & maintain the same components that I use for prototypes/design, so the collaboration aspect is quite seamless:
https://github.com/framer/framer-bridge-starter-kit
This is why I use Framer, they have a built-in export to React function that is really powerful for early startups (as the whole tool is built on React)
My team has been using our Framer export (with a few tweaks) as the actual final UI for our early product. Designing is as easy as in Figma, with the advantage that you have actual React components out of the box (working chart libraries, video components... any package you want to use). Whatever you design is responsive, can be connected via API to any database, and all of this is done collaboratively in the same document.
It has been a mind-blowing experience in terms of product shipping speed, and as a designer, it really makes you connect in a deeper way with the complexity of the final code.
The most important processes require physical presence. The ones that are digitalized aren't a good solution either, as these people might not speak Spanish very well, or they don't have the required digital literacy to access & go through a government website (which is a problem for locals as well). The solution right now is to offer personalized support from volunteer organizations on an individual basis.
COVID has affected quite a lot. Most of the processes have stopped as the government shut down the in-person offices, and now they are slowly reopening... and the situation was already crowded before the pandemic. On the positive side, extradition orders have been temporarily paused.
Specifically, I'm working with a local pro-refugee organization in a densely immigrant populated region in Spain. There's a complex chain of steps that you have to go through in order to acquire citizenship. Only people with access to good lawyers are able to deal with all the bureaucracy of the process, without mentioning other problems (missing obscure expiry dates that reset your process, language-related problems, local government workers not actually knowing/willing-fully ignoring migrants' rights...).
There's a good network of volunteer lawyers working on this issue, but its not scalable. I'm working on a platform that would allow migrants to solve their own situation, by crowdsourcing the knowledge of lawyers on a case-per-case basis and offering a simple interface in their language to track open processes & discovered the ones they need to go through and how.
As an abstraction for this, I've been thinking on how we could improve citizen/government communication. A small use case / example for this could be refugee camps. My previous experience here is that they are small, disconnected communities with a top-down type of organisation towards the camp organisers. It shouldn't be hard to provide real-time tools for connecting both, potentially leading to things like asking for their needs, managing their legal situation, or even allowing for voting & self-governing.
Definitely, I'm not affiliated to Sketch but there are a few things on the article that are outdated. Through Sketch Cloud you can actually handle commenting, clickable prototypes and assets for the front-end team (avoiding using Zeplin and Invision). The plugin ecosystem is really strong on Sketch as well, and they are also rolling out collaborative editing this year.
Well, I've found it pretty useful to hand animation in js as-is for specific patterns (as we actually handle the specific bezier curve animation, timings, etc...)
Hit me up with your project, I offer free consultations.
Full-time freelance visual design expert for a wide variety of projects, strongly focused on usability and functionality. Continuously iterating an idea against the market, using quick mockups to ensure that the user experience is consistent and flows seamlessly, is what I do. I have over 4 years of experience specifically working with startups in the Fintech, blockchain & international conflict management ecosystems.
Last few years of Congress: https://andratwiro.github.io/riot/?city=congress&solo=1
Reichtag during Hitler's takeover: https://andratwiro.github.io/riot/?city=weimar&solo=1