Creating a Scorecard for Massachussetts Legislators

As a volunteer project, I designed and built a new interface to help people explore state legislator voting information collected by a grassroots organization called Progressive Massachusetts.

The GatsbyJS statically-generated site uses Google Sheets as a lightweight CMS and sources additional legislator data from the Open States API.

The code is open source and you can check it out here.

Original Interface
New Interface

Before I built the new site, the legislator voting and scoring information was only accessible in embedded Google Sheets on Progressive Massachusetts' website. This required users to 1) already know who their legislators were, 2) navigate the unwieldy embedded spreadsheet, and 3) to look at a different spreadsheet for information regarding the content of the bills in question.

the old view of the scorecard -- a busy csv sheet — **Older interface:** In order to understand the spreadsheet, you had to already know who your representative was, and in order to understand the context of any particular vote you had to follow the tiny link at the top to load the full text of the bill. As someone new to state politics, I personally found it difficult to parse.