Georgia State Election Board - Client
Chris LaFay: Yes.
Dawn Audano: Reading all of that. And it took me this long to process it, and I was like, oh, now it's 10:01.
Chris LaFay: No, you're all good. And I did. She asked if I was going to call her, and I was like, no, we're doing a meeting. So I, I. What I have learned is that Sherry, even though she was my main point of contact at the beginning, she is definitely not the decision maker Hope is. And Hope now has an even bigger title than she had before.
Dawn Audano: Hopeful. Sorry.
State Election Board: Hey.
Chris LaFay: And Hope's plate is now even more full than it was.
State Election Board: Oh.
Chris LaFay: Oh, snap.
Dawn Audano: Funny. I'm just so funny.
Chris LaFay: I know, right? The Monday. It's the Monday morning humor. It's the best.
Dawn Audano: I have humor all the time. I don't save it for Mondays. Hopes declined this meeting.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. No, she. Yeah, no, no, she did, because I. I just. I was texting with Sherry as that last meeting was going on.
Dawn Audano: Okay.
Chris LaFay: And I basically want. Even though she. She asked, like, will you call me? I was like, no, let's do the Google Meet. And she said, okay, it'll only be me. Nothing official. Like, okay, I do. I need. So we need to figure out the whole meeting Cadence thing. And I want to show her what I did, because I need them to know that they have a required, like, style that they have to. That they have to hit. And so. And I think it's pretty dang close. So. How was your weekend? Did y' all do anything fun?
Dawn Audano: I had half on Saturday, and then we went to go see Chloe on. On Saturday, Evie was in a play, so we saw 101 Dalmatians, which was basically somebody thought to themselves, I really like this Cruella Deville song. Let's make a 27 minute play out of it. And so, like, all of the songs are different variations of that song. It was funny, but it was fine. The girls and they played in the pool at his cart.
Chris LaFay: That is. That's hysterical. What we will do. Just thinking about that.
Dawn Audano: Oh, should I let her in?
Chris LaFay: Oh, sorry, my bad, My bad. I. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't hear the buzz. Yes, please.
Dawn Audano: No. Hello.
State Election Board: Hey.
Dawn Audano: How's it going?
State Election Board: Going good. How are y' all doing?
Dawn Audano: Good. Happy Monday.
State Election Board: Happy Monday to y', all, too.
Dawn Audano: I'm glad you could join us. Chris worked very hard last week to make sure that he got everything hitting the specifications. So we wanted to make sure we were able to show you what we were doing last week, get you up to speed. I. Chris communicated with me. Oh, somebody else is trying to come in.
Chris LaFay: Is it just my note taker?
Dawn Audano: It is. Do you want me to admit it?
Chris LaFay: No, it's fine. We're good.
Dawn Audano: Okay.
Chris LaFay: So.
Dawn Audano: I saw we got all your notes from a couple of weeks ago or a couple of Fridays ago, and so Chris has made some adjustments based off of that. Chris shared with me your voicemail that you left him around changing the time or the day of the meeting. I. We can do that. I love doing them in the morning so that we can. I usually connect with my team in the morning to make sure that we all have our plans for the week, which is what? I do it on Tuesday because we always have Monday calls. So I know what everybody needs at the end of the day Monday. And then on Tuesday, I can tell my team what everybody needs. But we can do a Tuesday call as well. Let me check my calendar. Are you able to do Chris, do you think I'm good to move a consume call and we could take this call. This call could take the 9:00 clock time. Okay. Are you able to do 9:00am on Tuesday?
State Election Board: Yes, ma'. Am.
Dawn Audano: All right, I'm going to go ahead and move that for next week. You should get an email with that confirmation and we will be good to go for that piece.
State Election Board: Okay.
Dawn Audano: And then is there anybody else I need to add to it or just.
State Election Board: Us, too?
Dawn Audano: Okay, cool.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Dawn Audano: Great. Excellent.
State Election Board: All right.
Dawn Audano: I will pass it over to Chris so he can kind of showcase where things are, get your initial feedback, and then if we can also do a loom video of what we've done as well so that Hope can kind of see where things are too.
Chris LaFay: Well, why don't we.
Dawn Audano: Or we can record this.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I'm pushing the magic button. One second. There we go. Okay, so I got your feedback. I got Hope's feedback from the. From the screenshots that she sent over. And so I wanted to kind of tackle this in two different ways. One, there was the design and overall aesthetic portion of what she sent over. And then two, there were kind of like the take the aesthetic out of it, but like the core layout pieces, different structures. And so the way that I'm looking at this is from a general aesthetic perspective the. The style of georgia.gov and that kind of that library that we talked about the very beginning that's a requirement to stay within the confines of was I took the design the pieces of. We have these cards with icon layouts at the top. We have, you know, an image with text on the left. We have this darker blue section with this type of work on It. The bulletins are actually going to be more like blog posts and not just like little two line pieces of notes. I took that and distilled that into an updated homepage layout. So you're going to aesthetically see a lot of the same things, but. But they're going to be designed in a slightly different way. Now the one other note that I'm going to tack into here is the. The type of imagery that AI generated that was very like flag overlaying people at the ballot box and kind of a darker, not darker tone in terms of negative, but just. It had. The images were. The images that AI generated were much more darker toned. I couldn't. In the libraries that they had available to us, there's about 10 or 15 images of voting didn't really hit that exact same note that you were looking for. And I also went on, we have a. We have a subscription to a stock photography website as well too.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: And I went through looking for some like voting things and all that jazz on that site as well, and I really couldn't find much there either. So you're going to see a lot of the same images. And I know for a visual person that's going to be hard to kind of like connect the dots here. But that is the one thing that'll look similar is the imagery. The imagery can be swapped. I just want to have. I just want to. I want to give you guys access to the library that I have through the state of Georgia, have you go through and look through it. And then also give you access to the stock photography site that we have the ability to pull images from too, and let you guys take a look at both of those and be able to say, okay, These are the 10 images that we like that we can kind of use across the board forward rather than me try to guess at these things.
State Election Board: Sure.
Chris LaFay: Does that make sense?
State Election Board: And also we can, we can use instead of the stars and stripes, just aesthetically simply State House might have a little bit more colors that she would like to do better. So we can all. That'd be something we can do later on.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. That sounds good. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and I'm gonna hope that I have not restarted my computer yet this morning. Let's see if it crashes on me.
State Election Board: Yes.
Chris LaFay: Victory is mine. Okay, so got your logo, got your. Got the seal up here in the top. And over here now where it belongs, we have all this navigation bar that's still the same. Went ahead and changed up some of the text here. This right here is that I was primarily talking about and to kind of show you like looking at like stock imagery that is voter oriented is all very like overly generic. Amir. Like that's just, that's just generic looking like this. It's all oh, not real feeling. And so I don't know like there's been some that were kind of like this. But this also feels very stale because it doesn't. This doesn't look like what like he's having an American flag on the side of the table there. So the, the state capitol building still feels the most real. And I'll send you over a link to the Dropbox folder that has some voting images in it as well.
State Election Board: Okay, thank you so much.
Chris LaFay: So here I went ahead and removed. So one of the things you had was kind of like this like four column layout and one of them with icons which we have a block exactly for that. And so went ahead and put those here. The, the downside that I see and this was the email that I sent over earlier last week is we're going to have about five or six pages on the site. All of those pages are pretty much going to be up here in the navigation bar. They can also be here too. That's not a problem. But we have a lot of like duplication of the same links so.
State Election Board: Sure. Yeah. And that doesn't keep it simple, does it? Yeah, that's. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And that's going to be the hardest part about your site is you're going to see a lot of these like especially if you work with AI. AI typically gives you way too much to work with. That's just a normal use case of it and the navigation bar that it created. And a lot of those has like seven or eight links with drop down menus. Well you just don't have that. And so the I do understand putting them down here to just add a little bit of bulk to the homepage. So it's just not like a banner section and then meetings and that's it. So I get why we want to have it there and I'm okay with it. Just know that it's going to be very duplicative of this up here at the end of the day. So then down below went ahead and actually kind of created use the same card style that we had already but put the actual dates of the ones that are upcoming. So rather than showing the one that is most the next one showcasing multiple. These are obviously all fake. You had a news and announcement section and before when we talked about bulletins. We were thinking about them kind of being like little sticky notes that go on the site to where it's just like, oh, hey, the bulletin is just going to be like a paragraph of information and that's it. But with the AI generation that you guys did, they looked a little bit more like blog posts where they had a title, a description and an image. So I went ahead and removed the bulletins aspect from things and. And this is basically just going to be a blog. Now we can call it whatever we want, we can call it news and announcements, we can even call it bulletin. But. And this is not, this is not built out yet, but when you go onto one of these, it'll have the main image, the title, and then the content of that blog post. So, okay, I bring this up because when we were doing our discovery meeting a few weeks ago, this is one of the, the things that we were pushing and pulling about. In general, the concept of doing bulletins to where they didn't look like blog posts like this, with images and titles and descriptions, was because I was under the impression that you guys wanted to not be forced to write out a full blown blog post all the time. Whenever you wanted to write up a news or announcements piece, you just kind of wanted to write up a paragraph, maybe upload a video and be done. The pro, the good thing about this layout and doing them kind of more like blog posts is the fact that they take up a little more room. You can have an image, you can have a title, description, the whole nine yards, and then you can click on them and learn more. And although there is not an image loaded up here, you can already tell, like if you only write a paragraph of information, even if there was an image attached here, it's a very thin page, so very bare. So I'm fine with doing either thinking of bulletins like sticky notes or like blog posts, but it, it needs to be one or the other. It can't. Because when you have a section and pretty much anything in web, if you have a section of data, that data has to be in the same format every time. You can't have some of them be like this, some of them be like that, and some of them be like this over here.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: There has to be consistency. So.
State Election Board: Right.
Chris LaFay: That's one thing to consider with these, is that with the design that you guys created with AI, it implies that these are going to be blog like, more longer, not long form, not thousands of words, but more than a paragraph. So that when you go to this it's not just the same thing as what you're basically what it is right now is it's the same thing that you read right here. Just over here.
State Election Board: Right. Do we have to have it jumped to another page or if that's all it is,.
Chris LaFay: It either they all have to. They either all have to link to another page or they all do not link to another page.
Dawn Audano: I gotcha.
State Election Board: Okay. One or the other.
Chris LaFay: Exactly.
State Election Board: So not Burger King. Have it your way. Right?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, exactly. 100. And it's a. It's. It's more for visitors going to the site. They need to know this is what they do. And it's not a if and or. But it's not like it's. They have a question with it. It's. When I see this section I can click on this thing done. Like it's. It's about consistency at the end of the day.
State Election Board: Right, Right.
Chris LaFay: So does all that make sense though?
State Election Board: It does, very much.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. Cool. So then because we added these over here and because that bulletin, the. In the previous version we kind of had a dark blue bar with like that bulletins kind of sticky note on the side that's now dropped because we don't need it. And then we go straight into the footer section here. And nothing here has changed. So. So the primary change is updated the content here, updated here and updated all of this stuff. So. And nothing over here has changed either. All of this layout's exactly the same. We have location, time, dynamic discussion items, documents that can be interconnected and interlinked. None of these things are real right now. I just had it create some sample dummy stuff that looks good. So thoughts or questions about this?
State Election Board: It looks really good. I think that there was a lot of blank space and I feel like that you kind of done that. I'm gonna see about the repeating. Looking at that. The only thing I wanted to ask is the news and announcements. Is there any way to. Would it be. Is there an archive that they would go into?
Chris LaFay: There will be.
State Election Board: So you would only have three. And then was there an archive button that will be there?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, that. That can easily be added. That's not a problem at all. Yep.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: You can think of these very much like blog posts. So like the archive page will kind of look like a standard blog. Like you know, like when you go to a site and there's like a card layout where it has like image, title, description and a read more link kind of in these like columns of cards. Basically like that's. That's what it Will be so.
State Election Board: And then would we be able to do. To drop images in on the back end?
Chris LaFay: Yes.
State Election Board: So once we start entering that.
Chris LaFay: Yes. So all of these will be drag and drop. And so you can drop in headers, paragraphs, bulleted list, text, video embeds, images. All of that is very cut and dry and.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Yes. And that'll be for all of this stuff here.
State Election Board: Looking at the top. So about us. Can you just open that?
Chris LaFay: Yes, that page has content on I think, right? Yes, it does.
State Election Board: Yeah. Yeah. And then it has. Now John, is there any way you can not cut his head off by chance?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, we. We can go back and re. Crop that. Yeah, that's my problem.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Unless actually is his is that image of his. Is that one? Yeah, his just is taller. Okay. This is actually a good thing to know in general about working with a website a lot of times. So like you see these sections, they all have images that are the same aspect ratio, right?
State Election Board: Sure.
Chris LaFay: A lot of images in web are all about the aspect ratio and not the native height and width. And so to keep things in alignment, typically speaking when you see stuff like this that happens, it's because the image itself was not cropped the same way as all the other ones were. So for example, these are pretty much all square images. John's is a tall vertical image. So when, when it tries. When the code tries to fit it into that square, it's going to center it up and then cut off whatever is in excess.
State Election Board: Sure, yeah.
Chris LaFay: And that's just a. It's one of the hardest things for people that I've worked with over the last like 15 years. It's the, the question that they always end up having. And so as you go and you work on the site longer term, which I know it's not going to be tomorrow, I get that. But keep that in the back of your mind. If you have images that are getting cut, typically speaking, you can you. If you go and crop them differently before original, then things will be better before uploading. Before uploading them. Yes. Because the website has no idea if your subject matter is in the middle, in the top left hand corner. Top right hand corner. It just basically fits the image to the window and in this case this window is a square and then cuts off whatever's remaining. Does that make sense?
State Election Board: It does, definitely.
Chris LaFay: Awesome.
State Election Board: Yeah, we got to fix all that.
Chris LaFay: And these are. Did you want to edit? These are the addresses that you sent over, right?
State Election Board: Yes sir. And we sent over updates on new people replacing these people.
Chris LaFay: Do you have Images for them. Because I think it was just text.
State Election Board: No, no, no, no. I'm talking about for the staff, for the agency.
Chris LaFay: Oh, okay, gotcha.
State Election Board: Okay. New names, new titles. Some people are not here anymore. So I know that you're probably. That's like so quick to do that. So that's like perfectly fine. The only thing we need to do is make sure that we add in the contact information for the agency staff. Like the emails. Well, up at the top, when you go to the agency staff, we probably want to put their personal emails on there.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
State Election Board: I don't know. That's how we have it now. So let me ask about that.
Chris LaFay: And actually something I just thought about. All of these addresses are the same, so in all honesty, we might just put them. Then that address is also down here as well too. So we honestly might get rid of these and then just put their. Their personal email address here. Because the. The default stuff is now there's no reason to have it duplicated, right?
State Election Board: 100%. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: In the future, when you do want to send over text requests or image changes and things like that, using this button over here on the side will actually keep us a lot more organized. So like for example, with this, if you were to click on report, it takes a screenshot of whatever you're looking at and then you can type directly in here what you want to change things to. So James Mills changes to Bob Smith with the title of executive person and then you can go rinse and repeat down the list. This keeping it here rather than individual one off emails. This actually gets it into our project management system.
State Election Board: And okay, so I think she sent some. So I'll go ahead and input that as she sent them too. And we also need. We'll be getting a new picture. So we've changed. We got a new board member. We'll need to get a picture. And then we. Dr. Johnson is stepping down, so we have a new vice chair. So we'll send all that.
Chris LaFay: Okay, perfect. And also within this as well too. You will not see nearly as many of these fields here. I'm logged in. So there's a lot more. Really all you'll see is just this explanation section right here. But at the bottom there's a link that says add attachment. So okay, if you wanted to edit Dr. Johnston, Dr. Johnston is leaving. Here's the new person and then be like Bob Smith, Vice Chairman and then whatever other details you wanted to have. And then you could then add her the picture from there.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: And that way we know exactly where that goes. You can also mark it up too. So if you wanted to, you can click these little arrows and rectangles. So if you wanted to be like, hey, it's this one. That also works as well. So. Okay, that would be. That gets everything into our system in a very easy to edit fashion to where we won't miss anything. Now what I will say is we don't get emails when these new ones come in. So my recommendation would be go through the site, make. Go through and do your edits and then drop us an email and say, hey, we just submitted a number of tickets just letting you know and we're. We're done for right now. So that way we know when to actually look.
State Election Board: Okay. To send it to both y'. All. Right.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, the. That when you're letting us know that it's done. Yes, that'd be great. Because I'm going to be out the next couple of weeks. So this week I'm in. But the following two weeks I will basically be unavailable.
State Election Board: Right.
Chris LaFay: So that two week time span would be great to get some content updates and changes in because dawn could go through those, make some of those changes while I'm out so that we can get some of this and then when I get back, we can then load in all of the existing meetings. Another thing to note, like if there's news and announcements that you want to go ahead and populate, three would be great to launch with. And what we would need to have is the image that you want to have as the main image, the title, and then whatever content you want to have.
State Election Board: Okay. Okay. Perfect. Can't believe this is happening.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
State Election Board: So request investigation and complaint process. Is that two different things or is it the same thing?
Chris LaFay: You're saying that. That I have no clue. Like that was actually another. Like that was actually kind of a small question I had too was I knew where rules and laws and board meetings. That all makes sense. But I was kind of curious, what's the difference here? Now I put in to this section the stuff that was in the AI generated images. So I thought that that might be the same, which I think there was a fourth one that said request an investigation, but I wasn't 100 sure. 4 Would not.
State Election Board: What is the complaint process say when you hit learn more?
Chris LaFay: Oh, it just goes to. It goes to a dead link at the moment.
State Election Board: Okay. Okay.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. So this is the requested investigation page which has kind of the information here, the links to file and then the address down at the bottom. And there should. Yeah, that's Not. I don't know why I clicked that.
State Election Board: Yeah, I think they're the same. So I'm gonna check on that.
Chris LaFay: I mean, this will probably be renamed then to request an investigation because you're also not learning how to. You're not learning how election complaints are filed. You're filing them.
State Election Board: Right. Right. Some people just want to complain. So that's another issue really. So, you know, people complain.
Chris LaFay: Know that happened.
State Election Board: I know. Who knew? I mean, my days.
Dawn Audano: So,.
State Election Board: You know, we'll.
Dawn Audano: We'll.
State Election Board: We'll talk about that. We'll kind of think about that. Because some people want to complain, but we, we want to try to get it to be like, in the short term of it, they need to really be utilizing the county. State election boards. You know, that's why we have the counties. 159 Counties. Right. We need to be the 911 call. You know, try to divert them to the counties and then, you know, let the counties. Because they can handle things quicker. And then us to be the 911 call. The county's not doing anything now. We can do it. So trying to. Trying to get that phase out where I like report investigation. Probably verbiage better than complaint, because that just opens the door. You know what I'm saying? But. But we can also. In the complaint process, we could also put in there. We could just put a thing about. Contact your local counties. You know, I have a letter that I send out with people that send stuff in that. Just complaining. So we make and utilize that verbiage and somehow put it in there about complaining. Is that contact your local county elections office. If that doesn't get resolved, then file an investigation with us. Does that make sense? Something like that. So that might work for that.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I would agree.
State Election Board: Might be a little different, but I think it would help.
Chris LaFay: So when you and Hope talk about that, when y' all come to kind of like a conclusion on what that looks like, just drop a note on that. That, that feedback button, let us know what that is and then let us know what. Either where we can pull that content from, from, or go ahead and write up the content that you're looking to put in there.
Dawn Audano: I could do.
Chris LaFay: We can do that.
State Election Board: Add a document in there.
Chris LaFay: You could.
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Like if you wrote it up in a Word document or something like that, you could then add an attachment that way as well, too. Yes.
State Election Board: Okay. That'd be probably what we'll do. It'll be quicker. That sounds great. That's the only thing I could think of. Just kind of looking at it, but I think it looks great. Chris, thank you so much. And, dawn, thank y'. All.
Chris LaFay: You are very welcome. If you have any questions this week, let us know. Don got the meetings moved, and so the next.
State Election Board: Thank you, Don.
Chris LaFay: Appreciate the next two weeks. I might next week. I will definitely not be in attendance the week after. I might be. It depends on a couple of things, so. Okay, awesome. That all sounds good. Well, let us know if you have any questions.
State Election Board: Thank you so much. Okay, thank you.
Chris LaFay: Take care.
State Election Board: Thank you all. Bye. Bye.
Chris LaFay: Bye.
State Election Board: Bye. Bye.