I was given 3 weeks to:

• Get the stakeholders (cofounders, Sales, and Marketing) to agree on a new visual direction for the company
• Design and build a 6-page website — including creating imagery that everyone agrees on, collaborating on copy, and exporting assets (which somehow always takes longer than you’d think)
• Make tech + design decisions that lay a solid foundation for future maintenance and growth

We were optimizing for 3 things:

• Make the company look credible
• Make the message clear
• Make it maintainable, easy, and cheap to produce

Here’s where we ended up:

On a deadline this tight, there’s no time for brand workshops or robust explorations of different design directions — and no need for them. Just know what broad strokes need to be applied, use your experience and intuition to make decisions quickly, and run with it. I used my instincts to figure out an appropriate aesthetic tone that resonated with the team: something bold, optimistic, human. Not just a typical tech startup. Less serious and staid than the rest of progressive politics.

As with most startups, but particularly in this extra-scrappy one, the most important design decisions here were not about creating a single well-crafted artifact, but about picking what tools to use, creating a stable foundation, and setting organic processes.

Colors: A rainbow of simple, safe, bright colors. Sometimes you need blue to represent Democrats. Sometimes you’re sick of blue and want something else. (Honestly, I’m so bad at color theory, I kept changing the exact colors. Whatever! Startups! Yay flexibility!)

Typography: I love my fonts, but this isn’t about me. I kept it simple with straightforward typography, using a robust type family (Tablet Gothic by TypeTogether) that costs no additional money to license with Adobe Fonts. No complex type systems or overly typography-driven design, which can be hard to maintain without a dedicated, skilled designer.

Assets: Use free stock/Creative Commons photos, the occasional emoji, hand-drawn elements that we can make ourselves, and a collage style that can accommodate a mishmash of different things. No custom drawn illustration, which takes time and money, and is hard to get consistent across different illustrators.

CMS: Building on Webflow (as opposed to Wordpress or something) so we don’t have to rely on additional engineers to build or maintain the site.

After setting up a flexible framework that did the job, we bit off some of the other pieces of marketing and brand-building, one at a time…

We shortened the name and cleaned up the logo to be more straightforward, human, and less explicitly related to politics, since nonprofits use the product as well...

Part 2: Designing volunteering and organizing tools for campaigns

At its core, Mobilize is a software tool for organizers — campaign field organizers, nonprofit professionals, or just local activists trying help their community. Organizers host events, get people to show up and do things, and then tell people what to do next — usually, attend another event. In the electoral context, this organizing is usually about contacting supporters to make sure they’ll show up and vote. It’s a critical part of campaign strategy in races at every level, and can be the deciding factor in close elections. (If you’re a left-leaning voter, you probably got dozens of texts this year from Democratic volunteers chasing your vote. Yup, that’s campaign organizing! And those people probably signed up to volunteer via a Mobilize link.)

Basically, the product is kind of like Eventbrite, but tailored for managing a volunteer program and getting volunteers more involved over time, moving them up the “ladder of engagement.”

When it comes to designing this product, it’s all pretty straightforward B2B SaaS software stuff — forms, tables, settings, etc. — but the boom-and-bust nature of electoral politics throws a curveball. Political tech is a distinctly different industry from mainstream tech. Everything is scrappy, and usability is an afterthought. Election Day is the ultimate immovable deadline, so timing and execution is everything. Every slip in timeline, or change in campaigns’ strategy, means that we need to cut scope or rearrange the roadmap in juuust the right way so users can get half-baked features just in time, without accruing too much product debt.

All this is to say, there was a lot to get done. We were simultaneously developing long-term product vision, digging out of product debt, creating new surfaces and features, running growth experiments, and ruthlessly scoping and rescoping MVPs to meet deadlines. We were flying the plane while building it… and trying to land on a moving boat…. that we were also building… just in time before the election.

On my end, I used everything in my product design toolbelt in order to:

• get more volunteers to sign up
• get volunteers to come back for more events
• help campaigns switch from in-person to virtual organizing
• clear up the confusing parts of the product
• cultivate community amongst volunteers
• let campaigns delegate organizing power to their volunteers, so a small team of paid staffers can scale operations quickly during a pandemic (a “distributed organizing” model pioneered by Bernie’s campaigns, and a core part of the Biden-Harris organizing strategy)

Most of the product work requires a fair bit of context, so I won’t go into those details. Here are some of the screens that are easier to explain.

As I mentioned before, the core of the product is the events-management dashboard for organizers. It’s all about efficiency and bulk data management, so I worked on identifying and addressing low-hanging fruit like increasing information density, exposing commonly-used filters, and setting general patterns for layouts and editing behavior. (The other features you see here were done by the other designer, Matt Bambach.)