Sector(s)
The Independent Election Commission was established in 2011 as an independent body concerned with managing and supervising the electoral process without interference or influence from any party. The commission is one of the fruits of political reform in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan led by His Majesty King Abdullah II, and it reflects the official establishment’s response to popular demands.
The commission was established with the aim of ensuring that parliamentary elections are held in line with international standards, in a manner that ensures the restoration of citizen confidence in the electoral process, its outputs, and to address negative accumulations of the past and build on the achievements and reform steps.
The IEC partnered with Vardot to build a secure and dynamic digital platform on Drupal for their external and internal users. The project was launched in Feb. 2020, you can visit the new IEC website here.
About the project
Seamless and Robust Content Management
The content on the previous website was difficult to edit due to the restrictive nature of their legacy CMS. The website admin needed the ability to edit, remove and add any content format and web forms at any time.
The IEC needed a powerful enterprise-level CMS that enables full digital content publishing and editing whilst guaranteeing on-site search engine optimization.
User Journeys Aided by Atomic Design
The key objective behind the IEC website is to provide relevant information to registered voters regarding when, where, and how they would be voting during election seasons. The legacy website design didn’t help them achieve this purpose at all. :
There were many essential UX and UI features missing from the website that makes its navigation almost impossible for the end-user.
Download the Guide to Atomic Design
Back to top Back to topPowerful Search
Tailored to accommodate the mobile user’s experiencer; the new website features a powerful in-site search engine that is capable of providing end-users accurate search results for their queries better and faster than ever thanks to the advanced capabilities of Apache Solr.
The new website now features 2 search engines:
- Voter ID dedicated search engine which presents relevant voting information to voters based on their ID.
- A general search engine that enables users to find the information they need and navigate the website easier than ever.
Mapping System
An interactive mapping system that displays dynamic maps of electoral districts and centers was introduced to the website as a novel feature to enrich the user experience of different target audiences:
- General Public: The mapping system allows voters to find their designated voting centers using their IDs. All relevant information they need will be presented in addition to the essential integration with Google Maps to enhance accessibility.
- Professional Organizations: Pollsters and researchers can easily access the numbers and data they need to report on the election performance by year. The mapping system enables them to filter down to access data relevant to the following levels:
- Governorates
- Constituencies and Districts
- Voting Centers
The mapping system is rich with content easily navigated by end-users due to the nature of the layered data structure. The mapping system was developed by building multiple map layers over each other easily filtered using a clear prompt in the form of a CTA button. The data requested via the mapping system would be presented in a visually seamless manner.
This feature will prove to be a massive step forward for the Jordanian public sector’s attempts at democratizing information and providing accessibility to organizations concerned with benchmarking and studying the electoral process in the kingdom.
Rich User Experiences
The IEC wanted the ability to create and upload downloadable assets via effective and simple to create web forms for their various target audiences. We delivered the ability to publish resources via webforms module.
Besides automated forms, we considered the IEC’s plans to initiate email marketing and messaging campaigns - so we ensured that all web forms will be compliant with privacy laws and regulations.
We also used the Poll module to enable the IEC to gather key data from their users in the form of online surveys easily manipulated by their marketing team. The results would be automatically displayed to ensure maximum transparency.
Back to topEnterprise-Level CMS
The new IEC Drupal 8 website had to be launched and tested before the parliamentary elections taking place in Q1 2020. Technically this was impossible but thanks to Varbase - the world’s leading Drupal 8 distribution - it elevated our relationship with IEC to become a strategic partnership in delivering the new platform and providing support post-launch.
Download Varbase CMS Datasheet
Building the new website using Varbase was a strategic decision due to the fact that Varbase is packed with all the core features and essential modules you’d look for in a digital platform and as such we were able to spend less time building the website’s core features and our efforts were more focused on custom module development.
The IEC now can enjoy:
- A multilingual CMS with an Arabic backend interface.
- A powerful CMS with a streamlined process for content management and publishing equipped with tiered roles and user permissions.
- Website content that is on-site optimized for all search engines.
- A seamless experience across all devices and screen sizes.
- A superior performance regardless of the content formats or quantity on the website.
- A dashboard system that displays web traffic performance thanks to the integration of the CMS with Google Analytics.
- Embedding interactive charts of data and statistics using any 3rd party app.
Why Drupal was chosen
- Seamless and robust content management workflow
- Simple yet richer UX
- Better navigation and engagement
- Higher search engine performance
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Varbase: The Ultimate Drupal 8 CMS Starter Kit (Bootstrap Ready)
Varbase is an enhanced Drupal distribution packed with adaptive functionalities and essential modules, that speed up your development, and provides you with standardized configurations, making your life easier. The essence of Varbase lies within the basic concept that initiated it; DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). Varbase handles that for you, relieving you from repeating all the modules, features, configurations that are included in every Drupal project.
In addition to being an authoring tool for rich content, H5P also enables your site to import and export H5P files. H5P files are package files for HTML5 content and applications.
This module provides a Solr backend for the Search API module. The backend uses, like the popular Apache Solr Search Integration module, Apache Solr servers for indexing and searching content. It has great performance, is suitable even for use on large commercial websites and supports facets and multi-index searches.
This module provides integration with Mailchimp, a popular email delivery service. The module makes it easy for website users or visitors to control which of your email lists they want to be on (or off), lets you generate and send Mailchimp email campaigns from your site, and lets you and your users view a history of emails they have been sent from Mailchimp.
Social bookmarking utility and sharing integration.
General Data Protection Regulation
This module aims to help site admins follow the guidelines and legislation set by the EU.
AdvAgg allows you to improve the frontend performance of your site. Be sure to do a before and after comparison by using Google's PageSpeed Insights and WebPagetest.org. The performance benefits are achieved by using some of the features found in AdvAgg and its submodules.
