Building grassroots organizing power through data solutions
Introduction
Politics Rewired is a political organizing team dedicated to building progressive organizing tools that enable grassroots organizing teams to save time and scale their work. Following their debut of Spoke Rewired, used by Bernie 2020's peer-to-peer texting program to become the most powerful, cost-effective peer-to-peer texting tool on the market, the Rewired team began developing new tools to help organizers grow.
Assemble is a database platform that uses spreadsheets and other easy-to-use views to manage projects and organize workflows. Combining the power of a modern database with the simplicity of online collaborative spreadsheets means that Assemble can be used for just about any organizing project—whether it's organizing voters, volunteers, workers, or tenants.
My role
As the sole UX/UI Designer on the Politics Rewired team, I collaborated with my team of engineers, product owners, and organizing teams to innovate and define features in the Assemble platform.
In collaboration with my team, I worked on feature brainstorming, ideation, wireframing, low-to-high fidelity prototyping, and developer handoff.
Defining the problem
— How might we design a tool that solves data problems and elevates workflows in grassroots organizing work?
Features Highlight
Formula Builder—
Using functions to build complex formula data types
While Assemble's interface uses familiar patterns from common spreadsheet tools, much of its power and capability lies in its comprehensive formulas system, which enables complex interactions between data fields using primitive functions that can be used to manipulate data and reveal salient data points.
As part of building this feature, we wanted to address a few key challenges users encounter in their current workflows in existing tools:
Function discovery — the ability to understand functions, their uses, and how to build a formula that produces their desired results
Error feedback—the ability to understand and debug formulas
CSV Import—
Importing data from existing sources
In order to appropriately manipulate and organize datasets from existing organizing workflows, users need a way to upload and merge existing CSV data to the Assemble platform. As part of this process, users need to be able to:
Perform an initial import
Match source data to appropriate Assemble fields
and deduplicate overlapping data entries
This process enables use cases like the ability to upload large files with voter information or membership lists, while ensuring that Assemble acts as a source of truth.
