Joseph Gray Designs | Project: Democracy Watch

Project Overview

In 2025, Human Rights First launched Democracy Watch, a tool that tracks and maps legislation and executive orders that threaten marginalized communities and democratic institutions.

This tool helps advocates fight back against the systemic attacks on human rights.

Jump To Solution

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Platform

Website & Web Application

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Organization

Human Rights First

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Sector

Civic Tech

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Timeline

Q3 2023 - Q1 2025

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Role

Lead Product & UX Designer

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Tools Used

Figma
Miro
Google Drive
Notion
Quorum
Google Analytics

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Responsibilities

Project Discovery
Plan & Facilitate User Research
Validate User Needs
Define Requirements
Stakeholder Management
Project Co-Management
UI Design
UX Architecture
Track Metrics Post-launch
Branding
Prototyping
Engineering Collaboration
QA Testing

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., speaks at a news conference about banning federal funding for the teaching of critical race theory.

Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect and NPR

Problem

Over the past few years, the Democracy Protection Program (DPP) at Human Rights First (HRF) has recognized a wave of antidemocratic legislative bills being introduced and passed throughout our country. Since 2022, they have tracked these bills by hand, but this work is extremely laborious for a small team. For example, in 2024 alone, there were over 100,000 bills introduced between U.S. Federal and State legislations.

Due to HRF's limited resources, the DPP team had historically only been able to track legislation on the Federal level. This left out a big piece of the picture, State Legislation. The DPP team needed a more holistic view for their own advocacy work and to help inform the public and state advocates what going on in their own backyards.

Arose the need for a solution that helped the team scale and communicate their research.

Research

Democracy Watch was originally designed to be an internal tool. After two phases of user research and stakeholder engagement, we discovered that the platform had much more potential than originally thought, so we expanded our user segments to include the general public and journalists.

Key Takeaways

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Our expert review is unique

We found similar offerings in the market, but none were direct competitors. Because we covered many categories and our experts were filtering for harmful legislation, Democracy Watch presented unique value to advocates and researchers.

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Alerts make all the difference

We conducted two rounds of discovery sessions and user interviews. We found that our users (advocates) valued specific features, like alerts and saved searches, and would use the tool more frequently if they were included.

Rather than just be a database to reference past legislation, advocates could start using Democracy Watch to stay on top of new bills.

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Non-experts need help drawing meaning

Tracking legislation can be overwhelming. The way bills move through legislature is complicated, and when there are thousands of data-points it’s hard to make sense of things. Creating interesting insights and visuals helps users immediately draw more meaning from data.

Solution

This project required collaborating with subject matter experts and software engineers to design systems that integrate custom AI models, 3rd party APIs, and content review processes.

The data would come in, and our experts needed a way to review and publish it, calling for two platforms:
- A public facing website
- A data management tool

Try Democracy Watch

Public Site

Democracy Watch features a dynamic heatmap of state legislation and an infographic for federal activity, enabling users to explore and track anti-democratic laws across the U.S.Users can filter by topic, location, status, and more to quickly find and analyze legislation of interest.

Democracy Watch helps advocates:

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Our expert review is unique

Track threats to democracy by filtering and visualizing legislation by state, category, year, and status.

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Our expert review is unique

Understand the full picture with access to bill details, sponsor histories, and legislative progress.

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Our expert review is unique

Stay up-to-date and take action through alerts on bill updates, new threats, and executive orders.

See hot spots of harmful bills

The interactive heat map shows which states have the most amount of harmful bills.

Filter by Desired Criteria

Find the bills that matter the most to you. Filter by Year, Region, Bills Status, Category, and Sub-Category.

Explore Bill Details

Democracy Watch has basic information about a bill in one place. View the Committee it’s in, the list of sponsors and co-sponsors, the activity of the bill, and more!

Look Into A Bill’s Sponsor

If you’re interested in a particular sponsor of a bill, you can learn more about that person and the other bills they’ve sponsored -- helping draw insights about what topics sponsors favor and oppose.

Executive Orders

After the results of the 2025 election were announced, we received many requests for more holistic tracking of Project 2025. Adding support for basic tracking of Executive Orders that fall under Project 2025 was within scope for the project, so we added the feature to the MVP.

Data Management Tool

This component of Democracy Watch is internal-facing and essential to the platform’s functionality. It enables the DPP team to review and manage legislation processed by the AI, verify its categorization, and ensure accuracy. The team can publish new bills to the public site, as well as update or remove existing ones as needed.

Review new and updated items

Publish approved items to the public site

Impact & Results

Advocates have a clearer insight into the wave of harmful legislation and executive orders sweeping the nation.

900%

Increased Tracking of Bills

The DPP team has been able to scale the amount of bills they track to cover the whole United States, from Federal to State levels.

150%

Faster Discovery

Democracy Watch helps the DPP team discover, review, and share harmful legislation with coalitions faster than ever.

2.2k

Active Users

In just two months since the soft launch, Democracy Watch surpassed it goal for active users. They expect this number to grow over Q2 once the alert feature is shipped to users.