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An All New All About Redistricting

Loyola Law School

GreenInfo team: Dan Rademacher, Gregor Allensworth, Tim Sinnott

Project years: 2020

An All New All About Redistricting 1
The new All About Redistricting website
An All New All About Redistricting 2
Example of court case page on website
An All New All About Redistricting 3
Example of State Summary page

Overview

What challenges is this project trying to solve?

  • As the All About Redistricting website continues to grow, it will need a revamp to modernize its appearance and to streamline its information to improve user experience.

What were the client’s objectives?

  • Interviewed journalists, advocates, and lawyers, who make up the key audiences for All About Redistricting.
  • Complex ideas and information can be more easily digestible and accessible when paired with elegant and meaningful design work.

Results

  • Professor Justin Levitt collaborated with Greeninfo to redesign the All About Redistricting.
  • Addition of a map creation and data download function for users.
An All New All About Redistricting 1
The new All About Redistricting website
An All New All About Redistricting 2
Example of court case page on website
An All New All About Redistricting 3
Example of State Summary page

The Work

About a decade ago, Loyola Law School Professor Justin Levitt built his website All About Redistricting. Levitt, a nationally known scholar on constitutional law and redistricting, populated the site with an unrivaled depth of information about legal cases, laws, and processes of legislative redistricting at the state house, state senate, and congressional levels. After learning about Greeninfo’s from our work on PlanScore, he partnered up with us to do a full site redesign and build.

 

Process

We started with a range of user interviews with journalists, advocates, and lawyers, who make up the key audiences who use All About Redistricting in their work. Based on our findings from those interviews, plus an inventory of the existing site — and Justin’s deep and ongoing collaboration — we developed an elegant, modern, and simple site design, with a modular architecture that prizes both accessibility and easy reuse of components in different parts of the site.

The heart of the site are the state pages and the cases section. The fifty state pages provide an overview of the current status, a list of recent updates, and a deep dive into current and past district maps, as well as a detailed explanation of the policies and practices in that state. We also list and link to the relevant court cases for that state. Those cases in turn form a searchable database of case law, and then each case page in turn presents a full annotated history of the legal documents for each case, as well as interactive versions of any relevant district maps that were part of the litigation.
Maps are now available for download on the All About Redistricting website. We built additional functionality into the site that allows users to download proposed and enacted maps and data (PDF, shapefile, geojson), starting with the most recent maps.
We built the application entirely in WordPress, giving Justin full control over content, with a CSV component to drive the data for the State Pages. We also have a fully documented process for Justin or his team to process and simplify spatial files for district maps (thanks, MapShaper.org!). Justin wrote his original site in PHP, himself, so we also were happy to have the site hosted on Pantheon.io’s WordPress service, which provides an excellent environment for collaborative development, backups, and version control.