XD
WhatsApp for
Civic Power
Experience Design — Research, Design Sprint Facilitation & Content Strategy
A four-day Google Design Sprint exploring how WhatsApp — at the time, used by 32 million U.S. Hispanics, 52% of the population and 10 million more than Instagram — could help organizers reach and activate Latino voters ahead of the 2020 election. The work became Reaching Latinos via WhatsApp, a guide I co-wrote and edited, published by Equis Labs in March 2020.
The Challenge
In late 2019, Brazil's "WhatsApp election" and the rise of Jair Bolsonaro were fresh warnings about what happens when a platform built for intimacy gets weaponized for disinformation. Equis Labs — a Latino-focused think tank co-founded by Stephanie Valencia and Carlos Odio — saw the same platform from the other side: WhatsApp was where U.S. Latinos already were, and almost no one organizing for the 2020 election was using it well. The question was whether a tool that could spread disinformation could just as deliberately be built into one for civic engagement.
I joined the Equis Labs sprint effort in December 2019 as UX Researcher and Facilitator, picking up field research already underway with organizers and digital strategists across the progressive movement, and spent the weeks before the sprint synthesizing it into sprint-ready material.
The Process
That research shaped a four-day Google Design Sprint in New York that January, run with Pivot Point Studio using the Google Ventures framework. Day one brought eight outside practitioner-leaders — from organizations including Community Change Action, Mijente, the Movement Cooperative, and New Florida Majority — together with the seven-person core team to map the problem and sketch individual solutions. Each participant pitched their own concept, and the group narrowed eight competing ideas down to one through a heat-map vote, speed critiques, and a final supervote. The ideas ranged from a gamified organizing app called El Juego 2020 to an influencer-support tool to a disinformation hotline built in partnership with Univision. The group ultimately chose a WhatsApp Organizer's Portal over a flashier multi-channel dashboard concept because it was simpler to build, testable within a quarter, and worked through WhatsApp groups organizers already used rather than asking them to adopt something new.
Sprint Prototype
I was involved throughout all four days. Over the next three, I named the winning concept — Whappi — and mocked up the prototype itself: the WhatsApp chat flows, the Whappi site, and the broadcast-list tooling. We built the walkthrough around a single user scenario — Angelica, a fictional census organizer trying to reach Latinx voters in Arizona — to make Whappi's value concrete rather than abstract, then road-tested it in five hour-long interviews with ten practitioners across five organizations on the sprint's final day.
Three themes came back clearly: people needed to know who built the tool and who was in the community before they'd trust it; they needed WhatsApp's basics explained simply before anything more advanced; and they didn't want another channel competing for their attention — it had to fit into what they already used, not add to it.
The Solution
Those findings, combined with what the sprint group had already prioritized in voting, fed directly into the next phase: a "WA 101" training deck and, ultimately, Reaching Latinos via WhatsApp: A Guide for Progressive Organizers, which I co-wrote and edited, and which Equis Labs published in March 2020. The guide covers WhatsApp's organizing models, platform mechanics, and international case studies from Brazil, Nigeria, Colombia, and India, alongside a content and style guide. The Whappi prototype and the published guide together formed the deliverable: a tested concept and the field-ready material to put it into organizers' hands.
The Impact
I also helped design the training strategy for rolling the guide out to a cohort of progressive organizations in early 2020. The guide remains live on Equis's research site today, covering WhatsApp organizing fundamentals for groups working with Latino communities.
My Role: UX Researcher & Facilitator, Co-Writer
Process: Google Design Sprint (GV methodology) · research synthesis · prototype testing
Client: Equis Labs | Year: 2019–2020