This time of year, many people go out onto the internet in order to decide who to vote for. There isn’t much that can be fit into little mailings, and the voter guide is often incomplete. This means the only other options are to phone/email the campaign headquarters or visit their website. Most people don’t want to bother phoning or emailing, and prefer going to the site to look up what they want to know. So what is it they want to know?
A poll revealed:
1 – Voting/Ruling History (Are they all talk? What actions and hard data is there on their past?)
2 – Endorsements/Donors (Who is supporting them?)
What people were not interested in:
Family life (Who their spouse is, where they grew up)
Baseless promises (Talking about what they plan on doing, rather than what they’ve done)
As an example, let me take the candidates for judge in Sonoma County, CA. The residents of the county I talked with said that they found choosing a judge was the most difficult of the categories since there was so little information out there. The internet is what they had to 100% rely on.
Notice the first thing that hits you is a massive block of mostly small text? Most visitors would really have to want to be there to stay. Huge blocks of text that keeps on scrolling and scrolling is a quick way to send people screaming to a different web site. it also has a lot of different colours all vying for attention– particularly in the large rotating photographs. A simple change to have those be in black and white would make a significant positive impact on the design.
In the hierarchy, the rotating photos first grab a visitor’s attention. It was a negative impact in my particular case. I am quite familiar with the differences between Jail and Prison. I know the average person thinks they are the same, but that is not so. Jail is where anyone could end up– innocent or guilty. You could end up there just by accidentally being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a sort of holding area. Prison is where the criminals go after sentencing. Building the main message of a web site on sending horrible criminals to Jail, therefore, is fundamentally flawed and confusing. It would have been a simple matter of changing the text that rapists should “Go to Jail!” to rapists should “Go to Prison!” and makes one question the qualification of the candidate for judge if he doesn’t even know something basic like that.
Second on the hierarchy are paragraphs explaining the candidate’s growing up years, and plans for the future. This is exactly what most people don’t want to know. After a quick glance at the navigation, none of them included past history or actions. His endorsement list was tiny and didn’t include much good information. In short, he had no information that was helpful to decide whether or not to vote for him, and huge amounts of useless information that people don’t care about. After carefully reading the entire site, a visitor still wouldn’t know whether or not to vote for him.
Although the design is clearly amateur, at least it has a somewhat clear colour scheme and sticks to it for the most part. The navigation is obvious and large enough for the elderly to click on without trouble. The list of his past positions is impressive, but there aren’t any specific case examples. “Presided over thousands of criminal misdemeanor matters” would it hurt to give case studies of a few of them? That is what people want to know, and do not enjoy having to waste hours trying to find out.
The endorsements were very helpful, because they included some key political figures and their positions. The fact he is endorsed by Mayor Pam Torliatt and Supervisor Efren Carrillo show that he is probably a liberal. Of course we’d know for certain if a list of past decisions and rulings were on the web site. So in the end, a tiny bit of information was gathered from the site, but still left a huge number of questions unanswered.
He has one of the most beautiful clean web sites of all the candidates. It has a light airy feel that encourages closer perusal. The white space use is excellent without being overpowering and the main sidebar navigation is nice and large. Unfortunately, the main navigation is tiny and gets lost– it is a small light grey and doesn’t look much like navigation. The endorsements page is well done, but the rest is still “all talk” as it were. While as a web site (other than the navigation) it is extremely good, it still fails as a voter information site.
Her colour scheme is carefully put together to induce an emotional state of calm stability. Someone knew what they were doing when they designed the site– while it isn’t impressive as a layout, the colours are very well chosen and effective. It is also simple and clear with its information, and the obvious social media list shows she is up-to-date with modern society. Her Twitter account is active and used properly. Often candidates don’t have one at all, or the use it incorrectly as just a place to list events. She interacts with those who tweet her and responds to them, showing a candidate who cares about the electorate. She is one of the few candidates who has a lot of endorsement quotes, rather than just names. The endorsement list itself is impressive, and includes photographs to break it up.
Unfortunately, all she lists is her platform, rather than past tactile actions. It is intriguing that pretty much all the voters want to know hard facts, rather than general promises, and yet all the candidate sites ignore that. You can pretty much put up the list of what real people want to know and find it is the opposite of what candidate web sites offer.
Without ending on a negative note, however, the fact they have a web site at all is very helpful in itself. Many candidates had no web site, so they wouldn’t even be considered by the vast number of younger people in the population. If you are going to all the sites to choose which judge to vote for, and discovered several of them had no site, that pretty much instantly eliminates them from the list automatically.
Even a poorly done site, like some of the ones above, gives an edge above candidates who have no web site at all.
Recent Comments