Experience

Latest Work

Audrey Valbuena

Election Results Pages Redesign

Designed a new ecosystem of 2000+ results pages, focused on bringing readers in from search.


Role
Lead News Designer Timeline
August 2023 - November 2024 Live product
Presidential Result page


Example results page, with navigational flow

Project Brief

Ahead of the 2024 election, The Washington Post wanted to completely rethink their elections ecosystem and product offerings. I was assigned to work on the election results pages, the core of our election night offerings.

The Post was looking to meet a very specific goal: How could we use results pages as a starting point in our readers’ election night journey? Our goal was split into three parts: 

  • Get readers on to the Post’s site through highly indexed SEO results pages
  • Make it easy to navigate to more result and content pages, especially on mobile
  • Offer something unique to differentiate Post results pages from competitors
Example result page from 2020



Context and competitive analysis

Early on, I looked around at the vast world of election results pages to understand what The Post had done in the past, as well as other outlets with strong results page experiences. This was great in gathering inspiration and ideas around what worked and what didn’t for election system navigational pathways.

Aside from reworking each results page’s flow and navigation, one of the major goals of this effort was to improve each page’s SEO. There are two primary ways folks come to our results pages: subscribers from the homepage, and non-subscribers from search. Since the Google results module appears at the top of most search results on election night, we needed to make sure our pages were specific and unique enough to beat out Google’s module by indexing high with specific search terms, like specific counties or bill measure, and unique enough that our content would differentiate itself from the generic Google module. 
Sampling of my competitive analysis



User research

My first order of business was understanding what our reader’s expected from the Post on election night. I did some early persona and journey mapping work, based off our 2020 strategy, to present a rough idea of where these pages could go.

After presenting these early personas and getting clear feedback on what questions we still needed to answer for this redesign, I worked with our Elections team to craft questions for in-depth subscriber interviews. Some of the questions we sought to answer were:
  • How do readers typically approach election results pages, and do they feel they understand the information presented?
  • What is missing from the current sources readers use for election results?
  • How do readers typically find election results online?
  • What types of data do readers find most useful and interesting when it comes to election results?

 Once our Research team had run the interviews, we were left with two primary findings: 
  • On election night, readers look for simplicity, speed and emotional balance when viewing results
  • Readers crave the data first on election night, but afterward want in-depth details and context surrounding these results, or as we began to call it, “the story of the night” 
 
Early persona work and journey mapping which led to greater research!



Concepts

My initial concepts aimed to push each primary research findings to the extreme — I crafted many different pages that pushed either conciseness and brevity, or liveliness and analysis. Through many rounds of mockups with the key stakeholders, we were able to identify which approach felt more important: clear, concise and reliable results as fast as possible. 

These initial concepts also help identify features that would become important for these pages. Around this phase, we began to explore conversations around the importance of our navigational model through the election ecosystem. Since the results pages, because of their emphasis on SEO, would likely be the way non-subscribers would find our site on election night, we wanted to be intentional about capturing their attention once there. 

Through these conversations, features like the Live Updates bar and the “See full results” buttons became crucial to the design of the pages, as they offered clear and varied options for readers to continue to their journey across our site during election night. This became a key focus of mine as we continued to massage the page designs. A bunch of early explorations










Concepts


I worked as the sole designer through 10+ rounds of mockups and feedback, creating a system of results pages that would be adaptable for the different graphics, components and types of content we would have throughout election night. We focused on three main page types: aggregate pages (like presidential or senate races), state pages (which aggregated all races for a state), and individual race pages (which held individual results for races all the way down to ballot measures for specific counties).  Just a few of the many Figma pages delivered for feedback











Final designs


Through monthly design reviews with our highest level stakeholders, we narrowed in on a design that focused primarily on concise results, clear navigation pathways and unique features.



The final mockups I delivered to engineering, showing page flow and components for each page type

We gave readers results immediately when they landed on our pages, with the Balance of Power bars and primary result module in the first mobile screen.




The anchor links and buttons leading to more granular results pages allowed readers to then explore more deeply.


Each page was rich with original content from the Post, with the “Post Pulse” module and updating carousels of content. 



We also provided clarity and transparency through a “How we report this page” module at the bottom of each results page.



You can read more about how the results pages redesign fit into the larger elections ecosystem and product offerings for the 2024 election.

Outcomes


The results pages’ key new feature was the navigation model: bringing new readers from search deeper into the Post’s election ecosystem with ease. We found that the navigation model I focused on was particularly successful with non-subscribers. Non-subscriber re-circulators were twice as likely to visit another results page than subscribers, and three times more likely to click a “See full results” button. These findings matched our expectation of reader behavior, and showed a high propensity to continue down the “funnel” into more Post content. Compared to previous election years, these results were seen as a success in capturing a non-subscriber audience. 

One thing I was particularly proud of with this project was the influence I had over workflow and process. Since we had so many high-level stakeholders reviewing our work, we knew it was important to make every second with them valuable and engaging. I developed an information sheet and slide deck format I would send before each design review, so we could spend the majority of the time discussing feedback and live designing. I found this was incredibly helpful in working through so many priorities with such a large group of people.

After this project, I also worked alongside the engineers to update our components in Storybook, and build out the first Figma library the elections engineering team ever had for the results page components. Live results pages



Examples of my information sheets and slide deck system 



This site is always a work in progress. It was last updated February 2025.

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