Veeto
Project Overview
Veeto is a civic tech platform designed to make engaging with state legislation fast, simple, and transparent. I led product design and front-end development, building the platform with React and Next.js, and creating reusable, performant UI components optimized for clarity and ease-of-use. By simplifying traditionally cumbersome civic processes, Veeto enabled users to complete tasks like submitting position letters to legislators in under two minutes, compared to the typical 10+ minutes. We helped send over 500,000 emails to legislators and let constituents crowdfund their trips to Sacramento to meet with legislators face-to-face.
Check out the live site here: veeto.app
Overview
The Problem
Complex domain
Civic engagement is notoriously intimidating for everyday citizens. Legislation is written with legal professionals in mind and is technically complex by design to ensure precision, creating an immediate barrier for public understanding and participation.
Archaic government websites
Current government interfaces create unnecessary barriers that discourage civic participation. To submit a position letter through California's official portal, users have to navigate a multi-step process: creating an account, manually updating extensive personal information, then searching through multiple dropdowns to find the appropriate bill and committee assignment, sometimes with thousands of results. The system also adds arbitrary timing restrictions – if a bill is assigned to a committee but that committee hasn't scheduled its next meeting, users cannot submit letters at all, regardless of the bill's urgency.
Deliberately inaccessible systems
Legislators systematically hide their direct contact methods. Rather than providing straightforward email addresses or contact forms (which exist for every legislator), representatives bury communication channels behind questionnaires that can take 10+ minutes to complete. Finding the right person to contact about a specific bill requires navigating multiple government websites to decode committee jurisdictions, bill assignments, and proper contact protocols, a research task that deters most constituents from engaging at all.
This creates a system that appears to facilitate public input while actually discouraging it through deliberate friction and complexity.
Broken feedback loop
Most people learn about bills in the news or on platforms like Twitter because they are reaching a legislative milestone or headed towards a final vote, too late for constituent input to actually matter.
Systems Approach & Strategy
- Progressive disclosure: Break complex civic processes into digestible, guided steps rather than overwhelming users with everything at once.
- Data integration: Unify fragmented government data sources to automatically match users with their representatives and relevant legislation
- Trust-first design: Government-appropriate visual language that builds credibility while feeling approachable to everyday citizens
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