ALASKA DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Meet the Candidates
A searchable hub of every Democratic candidate running for Alaska State House, State Senate, and Statewide office. Designed and built to help voters find their district and the candidates on their ballot in a minute or less.
Role
UX Designer & Front-End Developer
Scope
Full candidate guide system & 90+ candidate profiles
Platform
Figma, WordPress, Elementor
PROBLEM
Alaska doesn't have a 'normal' ballot
Alaska runs one of the most structurally unusual election systems in the country, and the party’s site had no existing way to explain it.
Non-obvious geography
Alaska's legislative districts don't follow city or borough lines. Anchorage alone splits into more than a dozen overlapping House and Senate seats, so "my district" is rarely obvious to a voter.
Rural, low-bandwidth reach
A meaningful share of the electorate is in rural communities where a slow, image-heavy site is not just an inconvenience, but a real barrier.
A fast and fixed deadline
The entire system had to launch several weeks ahead of the August 18 primary.
Role & Goals
Design, build & ship
I led this project end to end: information architecture, visual design, and the WordPress/Elementor build, including the templating logic that generates each candidate page with cross links to related races.
01 — Search Function
Let any voter find their ballot fast
Search or browse by candidate name, district number, or home neighborhood with no need to know your district code going in.
02 — Comprehension
Consistent Candidate Profiles
Bio, priorities, district map, and events in the same layout whether it’s a first-time House candidate or a sitting Governor.
03 — Voter Action
Getting users registered to vote
Surface voter registration, polling locations, ranked-choice voting explainers, and absentee ballot requests on every page.
WIREFRAMING
Designing with Goals In Mind
Once I had a clear focus for the project, I began to ideate the design. I created the following wireframes and presented them to the client. The adjustments from this point in my design to the final project occured as I expanded on user paths and navigational freedom, adding more ways to cross-navigate pages and easily find and search for candidates.
High-Fidelity Wireframes of the User Journey
Information Architecture
User Flexibility
Rather than one long list of every candidate in the state, the hub splits by race type first, matching how Alaskans actually think about their ballot. Then it lets voters narrow down by geography once they’re in the race that matters to them.
Each race type gets its own entry icon and its own listing template, but every candidate, from a first-time House challenger to a sitting Governor, is described with the same fields so voters never have to relearn how to read the page.
SOLUTION: Flexible Search Functionality
Search that meets voters where they think
“HD-18” means nothing to most voters.
“Government Hill” means everything.
The system can be searched by region, district, neighborhood, and name of candidate. The State House and Senate pages group candidates by region, then lead every entry with the district’s real communities before its administrative code, so “Ketchikan, Metlakatla, Wrangell” does the work that “HD-18” can’t. Additionally, every card ends in a single “Learn More” action, so the user has no ambiguity about what to click next.
Solution: Candidate ProfilE CONTENT MODEL
One template to answer the whole ballot
Every candidate for any office gets the same general profile anatomy. I designed the profiles to answer four questions: Who is this? What are their priorities? How can I get involved? Who else is on my ballot?
With more than 90 candidates across three race types and a hard election deadline, this could not be a page-by-page build. I designed a repeatable content model in WordPress and Elementor so that adding a new candidate was a data-entry task, not a design or coding task.
Challenges & Tradeoffs
I Designed With These Challenges In Mind
Volume under deadline pressure
90+ candidate profiles had to be designed, templated, and populated ahead of a fixed primary date. The only way to meet schedule was to resist the urge to make every profile bespoke, and instead invest early in a template flexible enough for a first-time House candidate and a sitting Governor alike.
Districts Different than mental maps
Alaska’s legislative boundaries split neighborhoods in ways that don’t match zip codes or boroughs. Leading with real place names, not district codes, in every listing and profile was the most impactful usability decision in the whole system.
A field that changes weekly
Candidates filed, withdrew, and were added throughout the cycle. Content within the candidate profiles was changed and expanded upon as well. The content model had to make it trivial for party staff to add a new profile or update a priority list without needing a developer in the loop.
Reach without exclusion
With many users in rural communities, the build stayed lightweight. No heavy client-side frameworks, straightforward responsive layouts, and text-first content that works on a slow connection.
Impact
What shipped
With a two-week total project timeline, the hub launched on July 10th, ahead of the August 18 Primary as the party’s single system for Democratic candidates statewide. It replaced a patchwork of individual campaign links with one consistent, cross-linked system covering all 40 State House districts, Democratic State Senate seats, and the Democratic Statewide ticket.
Since launch, there has been a significant spike in site views and active viewers on the Alaska Democrats website. Additionally, when analyzing the site metrics, all 4 pages in the apparatus (Meet the Candidates, State House, State Senate, and Statewide) are in the top 10 viewed pages for the month of July.
Reflection
What I learned for my next project
Design the data model before the page
The profile template only worked because I mapped the fields (district, region, neighborhoods, priorities, incumbency) before touching layout. The layout fell out of the model, not the other way around.
Plain language beats accurate jargon
"Government Hill, JBER, North Muldoon" will always out-perform "HD-18" for a first-time voter, even though the code is more precise.
Simplicity Scales
Owning design and development end to end on a fast moving project taught me that simplicity is the key to managing larger data sets, especially with time constraints.