469 Tracker

I designed and built 469 Tracker as a civic-tech platform to make a complicated political question easier to see: where does each member of Nigeria's National Assembly stand on the Reserved Seats for Women Bill? Because accountability should not require a political science degree and three open tabs.

The Problem

What interested me about this project was not just the issue itself, but the interface problem around it. Legislative accountability often exists in fragmented updates, closed conversations, screenshots, press statements, and long documents that most people will never read.

As the creative engineer on the project, I wanted to turn that into something immediate and public. Not a policy archive, but a tool people could actually use. Something that lets you check your state, understand the current landscape quickly, and move from abstract politics to visible positions.

Core Idea

The strongest move in the product was making the map the center of the experience. The map was not garnish. It was the plot.

Instead of presenting the bill as a long explanation first, I built the interface around navigation, orientation, and visibility. The map lets the issue become local. You are not just reading about a national debate. You are checking where your state and your representatives stand.

Data Visualization

The map was not decorative. It was the product.

I used it to compress a lot of information into something legible in seconds: state-level stance, yes/no distribution, hover summaries, direct selection, and deeper drill-down when a state is opened.

That mattered because the issue needed more than awareness. It needed legibility. The visualization turns scattered political signals into a public surface people can navigate, compare, and discuss without needing to decode the usual institutional PDF energy.

• State-by-state exploration through an interactive Nigeria map
• Color-coded stance reading for quick scanning
• Hover summaries for fast context
• Selected-state overlays for deeper inspection
• Aggregate vote distribution for a national read at a glance

Design Direction

I wanted the site to feel urgent and public-facing without becoming visually noisy. The direction leans into strong campaign energy: bold type, high-contrast structure, clear color signals, and simple interaction patterns that stay out of the way. Loud enough to move, disciplined enough to trust.

The product needed to feel accessible to someone arriving from social media, press coverage, or word of mouth. That meant fast orientation, low friction, and a visual language that feels active rather than institutional.

Engineering

On the engineering side, I kept the stack light and focused: React, Vite, Tailwind, Motion, Lenis, React Simple Maps, and D3 geographic tooling.

One of the more useful decisions was using a Google Sheets-backed data flow instead of building a heavier admin system. Very unglamorous, very correct. It made the tracker easier to update operationally while still letting the frontend normalize the data, join it with GeoJSON, and compute state-level and overall totals for the visualization.

• Google Sheets as an editable source of truth
• GeoJSON + map projection for the state visualization
• Frontend aggregation for state totals and stance counts
• Motion for overlays, dropdowns, and progressive disclosure

Impact

The project did what I wanted it to do: take a distant legislative issue and make it feel visible, current, and explorable.

It also travelled well. The work was featured by Premium Times and TechCabal, which mattered because distribution was part of the design problem too. The tracker was not just meant to sit online, it was meant to move through public conversation.

More than anything, I see 469 Tracker as an example of what I enjoy most: building products where interface, narrative, and data all need to work together for the thing to actually mean something.