Civic Engagement UX
Designing a Gen Z–first voting experience
Project for:
Headcount
Headcount is a nonprofit organization that helps young people participate in democracy by providing clear, accessible voting information, often in cultural spaces like concerts and festivals. Their website plays a critical role in helping first-time voters, volunteers, and donors take action quickly, often on mobile.
Headcount partnered with Standard Beagle to rethink Headcount.org as a modern civic engagement UX that better supports Gen Z users and simplifies key civic journeys.
Expertise
Our team provided UX strategy, user research, information architecture, usability testing, and product design expertise, with a focus on creating a scalable experience grounded in real user behavior.
Client
Headcount is a national nonprofit dedicated to civic engagement, best known for registering voters at concerts, festivals, and cultural events. Their work sits at the intersection of culture, participation, and digital civic engagement
Timeline
We worked closely with Headcount over several months, beginning with discovery and research, followed by design, iteration, and usability testing to support a research-driven civic engagement UX approach.
Challenge
Make voting information easier to find, trust, and act on, especially on mobile
Headcount’s website served a wide range of audiences, but young voters consistently described the experience as cluttered, overwhelming, and hard to navigate, particularly on mobile. Users struggled to quickly answer basic questions like:
- Am I registered?
- How do I vote in my state?
- What do I do next?
At the same time, Headcount needed the site to support volunteers and donors, reflect their non-partisan stance, and connect civic action to culture in a way that felt authentic to Gen Z, raising the bar for effective civic engagement UX.
Solution
Research-driven design focused on clear journeys
We started with discovery, including stakeholder interviews and moderated interviews with young voters (18–29), followed by a UX audit of the existing site.
Based on research insights, we redesigned the experience around clear, color-coded journeys for core actions like registering to vote, making a voting plan, and staying informed. The resulting civic engagement UX prioritized mobile clarity, reduced cognitive overload, and made next steps immediately obvious.
High-fidelity designs were iteratively tested with young voters to validate clarity, recall, and ease of use before finalizing the design direction.
Impact
Validated designs that reduced friction in core civic tasks
Measurable clarity for first-time voters
Usability testing showed that the redesigned experience made Headcount’s core actions immediately clear to young voters, reducing hesitation and cognitive load at first contact.
All tested participants identified key calls to action (such as registering to vote or checking registration status) after viewing the homepage briefly, validating the effectiveness of the civic engagement UX in high-attention, mobile-first scenarios.
Friction-free voting journeys
All tested participants were able to navigate primary voting journeys, including registration and state-specific voting information, validating the effectiveness of the civic engagement UX for mobile-first users.
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