Case Study
CivicPulse Mobile Concept
The bill on CivicPulse's Legislation screen is real. "Housing Options and Opportunity Act (25-0066)" comes straight from a Baltimore mayor's-office documentation. Every screen traces back to an actual city record, because the whole point is making real city data legible.
Click through the full prototype above, or open it in Figma → (opens in new tab)
30-second summary
Problem
City data is already public but it's unusable: buried in PDFs, split across department websites, written for staff, not residents.
Approach
Solo concept work: two personas at opposite ends of civic engagement, grounded in real Baltimore legislation and budget records.
Key decision
Same information, two depths (skimmable vs. trackable), always sourced back to the original record: make the data legible first, let trust follow from that.
Status
Concept only. Not tested with real residents. City-impact case is reasoned, not measured.
The problem
Every city government I looked at makes its data public: council votes, budgets, 311 requests. Almost none of it is usable by the person it's supposed to serve. It's buried deep in department website archives, split across PDFs, and written for city officials rather than the community.
Two Baltimore residents, two different starting points
Jasmine, the organizer
Runs community programs, already attends council meetings. Needs to track a bill from proposal to outcome without hunting across five city websites.
Jordan, the bystander
Doesn't vote locally, gets his news from social media platforms. Wants to find out what's happening in his district without becoming an activist.
Same information, two depths: skimmable for Jordan, trackable and shareable for Jasmine.
Five screens of real data, plainly shown
Why this would matter to any city government
This never shipped to real residents, so there's no participation or trust data to cite. What I can show is which city-level goals each decision was built to move, and why.
Lower staff burden, not just resident convenience
Legislation tracking status paired with a source link is directed at the "where's my money going" question that otherwise lands as a 311 call or a constituent-services email. A resident who can self-serve the answer is a repeat contact a city office doesn't have to staff.
Attendance and comments are what get civic offices funded
Civic-engagement offices are often funded and graded on two things: how many people show up to meetings, and how many public comments they get. One-tap RSVP and a dashboard that opens on what a resident already follows make it easier to move both.
Legible data as the thing being sold
Breaking the budget down by neighborhood matches the kind of equity mandate many city offices already carry: proof that spending is distributed fairly across the city. And because the tool only shows sourced facts, not city talking points, residents have a real reason to trust it instead of writing it off as another city PR push.
What I learned
Designing for civic tech was interesting because making the data transparent kept running into a trust problem. Show a rep's voting record and it can read as a smear. Personalizing by neighborhood can read as surveillance. The only real response was to push neutrality.
The primary limitation: this is unmoderated concept work, not something validated with Baltimore residents. The reactions to it can only be found through testing. A concept this dependent on earning trust needs to be tested with the people whose trust it's asking for.