block by wboykinm 4347193

UX/UI Notes from the Burlington, VT Districtbuilder deployment

#BTVVotes - Public Feedback

BTVVotes.org can be accessed here until the redistricing process has ended

  1. The press loves it but doesn’t quite know what to make of it. One reporter expressed great respect for the council after giving up halfway through a plan; more a reflection on the process than on the tool in that case.
  2. The city likes the concept but doesn’t see the need to move past PDFs - I was frequently asked to make “One of those GIS maps” in PDF to show something that had a perfectly-shareable URL. This could be reflective of the digital divide in some ways (big chunks of the city could be called “digitally disinfranchised”), but a basic failure of outreach in others. The city waffled.
  3. One neighborhood committee member called DistrictBuilder “awkward, inflexible canned software” - I resisted the urge to explain how goddamn hard the process used to be.
  4. Several people expressed frustration at the need to toggle between selection and navigation cursors.
  5. Lack of touch handlers for navigation made it difficult to use on a tablet, which might otherwise be the strongest outreach tool available.
  6. Granted, redistricting itself is a convoluted and complex process, but the hierarchical organization of plans is confusing to municipal-scale users. We are only drawing city wards as our legislative unit, but there is a strong desire to move fluidly between the number of districts proposed. Everything from three wards to 10 have been floated, which leaves users awkwardly consulting a cheat sheet on the side instead of looking at the statistics sidebar for deviation guidance.
  7. The city GIS manager requested a sidebar section showing numerical % deviation from target; the specific numbers have frequently come into play.
  8. This may be unique to our case, but the process requires a low “Overall Deviation”, which is computed as the difference between the % deviations of the district furthest under the population target and the district furthest above it. A live report in the sidebar would be immensely helpful here.

I would be interested to know if any of these could be solved with clever configuration or if it’s all for the wish list. Thanks again for the great toolkit, in any case!