timeline: six weeks
role: developer
company: Hearst DevHub
skills: web development, web design, React.js, UX
the project
The goal: to build a refreshed, more usable version of the Hearst Newspapers voter guide in time for the 2024 election season.
I worked on this project during my internship with Hearst DevHub, a centralized team of developers and designers that collaborates with Hearst’s local newsrooms to build interactive, data-driven stories. In preparation for the upcoming election season, my manager created a mockup of a refreshed voter guide template with new features – it included a more streamlined, one-column design, an address input field to allow the reader to create a filtered, personalized guide, and the ability for readers to save, view and export their selections at the bottom of the page. I was assigned to build the guide with a senior developer on the team and tackle any design- or UX-related challenges as they came up.
the process
This was one of the most heavy-lift projects I’ve worked on, as we built this guide practically from scratch over the course of a month and a half. I learned so much from Vivien, the senior developer I worked with throughout the process – we had to organize huge quantities of data (some of Hearst’s papers planned on including hundreds of races in the guide) and display it in an easily-navigable way that wouldn’t overwhelm the reader. I also got the opportunity to design sections of the project as we built it, including the editorial endorsement subpage that complements the guide.
Once we had a working project, we shared the template with the Houston Chronicle’s politics team so we could test the page with real election data and iterate upon our initial build as needed. One of my biggest takeaways from this project was the importance of creating scalable design for a template like this, which needs to work across five different newspapers – election data can be messy and variable across different states and counties, so working with each newsroom was helpful to make sure our template could accommodate any race or measure it hoped to cover.
the solution
The Houston Chronicle was the first paper to publish our redesigned voter guide in preparation for their November 7 mayoral race; since then, the Connecticut Insider, the San Antonio Express News and the Times Union have all used this template to inform their readers about upcoming elections.