Engineers Tomás Piaggio and Joaquín Varela, founders of the company Create Thrive, recognized a need in the primary elections and provided a solution for voters.
According to Piaggio, the website was created because “until now, to find out where to vote, you had to use your voter ID on an outdated website with a poor user experience.”
That is why they decided to innovate and find a way for users to search for their circuit simply by entering their first and last names, using a user-friendly interface that adapts to any device and, above all, displays search results quickly.
During the development of the site, they encountered several challenges: first, designing it for a very broad range of users, from age 18 and up. “I think we achieved that by creating a simple interface with few steps and a clear explanation of how it works.”
The second major challenge had to do with the site’s architecture. According to Piaggio, “the website went live on Saturday, June 22, and quickly went viral on social media. Within just a few days of going live, it was receiving more than 40,000 visits per day. This forced us to focus on how to handle the high volume of requests to the server.”
The e2019.uy website also allows users to request voter lists from the various political parties. “Political groups want to reach more of their potential voters, and many of them lack the budget to fund an advertising campaign, which is why we added this feature.”
They managed to develop the website in a short amount of time, but they had to work long hours and carry out many tasks simultaneously. In just one week, they designed the site, integrated it with the Electoral Court’s API, developed the code, tested it, and deployed it to production.
Alongside these activities, they launched a digital marketing campaign. “For this, we enlisted the help of Lucía Kröner, who also holds a bachelor’s degree in Management and Administration from ORT University,” explains Piaggio, who is pleased with the response it has generated.