One year from today voters will hit the polls to elect our next president. While the GOP field is still undecided, we wanted to take a look at the campaign websites to evaluate how usable they are for potential voters and if voters are finding what they want.

From October 21 – 24, 2011 our team conducted a usability study on the websites of six of the GOP presidential candidates. Our study took 15 voters of all different ages and voting histories and put them up against the campaign websites two at a time in a head-to-head match up to see how voters interact with each of the websites to identify trends and patterns during a series of “tasks.”

Surprising enough we found that the campaign websites seem to place campaign objectives before the actual needs of the voters.

How it works

We conducted competition experiments (like a cage match!) between six Republican presidential candidate websites with 15 undecided voters.  The candidates selected for this study were:

• Michele Bachmann - michelebachmann.com
• Herman Cain – hermancain.com
• Jon Huntsman - jon2012.com
• Rick Perry - rickperry.org
• Mitt Romney - mittromney.com
• Rick Santorum - ricksantorum.com

Participants were instructed to complete a series of structured tasks, from signing up for a campaign newsletter to finding out info on the candidates biography. 

The study was structured as a standard qualitative usability study.  Some have asked why we don’t need a large sampling like we see in polling. It’s true that the number of participants is smaller than those found in polling. But this is nothing like polling which relies on surveying large numbers of voters to get quantitative data – numbers based data that can be measured.  Our study isn’t a survey and we aren’t looking for quantitive data.  We’re  looking for experience-based observations found in qualitative studies.  (More information on the difference between qualitative versus quantitative.)

In human factors, we can uncover the majority of problems associated with a task on a website after 4 to 6 participants.  Since we were looking at problems common to all candidates, the fact that we had 15 participants – with a total of 30 visits to campaign websites – only gives us more information to work with.

Each candidate’s website appeared in one round with every other candidate’s website.  At the end of each round, the participant was asked to select with candidate’s website had the best overall experience.

What we found

You will have to check out the report page for all the details but here are some interesting tidbits from the study:

• The Bachmann and Cain campaigns had the best overall user experience. Bachmann’s and Cain’s campaign websites both won four of the five rounds in which they participated.
• Considered an political industry standard, the email collection “splash” pages positioned before every candidate’s homepage are annoying and confusing to participants often to the point that they leave the site entirely. (All participants over the age of 60 believed they were on the wrong website.)
• The Romney campaign website suffers from mission-critical failures that are relatively easy to resolve such as lack of a homepage navigation item and hard to identify secondary navigation in important areas like the “Issues” section. These problems kept participants from accomplishing their tasks, believing that content they sought did not exist.

Additional findings, along with comments from participants, are recapped in this presentation.

Don’t forget the voter

The most important thing that the campaigns have to learn from this study is that campaigns cannot leave voter wants, needs and motiviations out of website development process. Many of the basic functions of the campaign websites are focused towards the campaign goals: sign people up and raise money.  However, what they don’t realize is that many people who will be visiting their websites view their interaction with the campaign in a traditional funnel process.

Our advice remains the same for political campaign websites as any other organization: design for the user and you’ll meet your organizational objectives quicker, cheaper, and easier.

More Information

What the People Want:  (Full Report)

Republican Presidential Sites (Largely) Fail Usability Test (ePolitics.com)

Coverage of the report on Campaigns & Elections

Investing in a few books about user experience and usability is the gift that keeps on giving.  Like my other favorite books, good books on user experience and usability are like old friends who never grow stale. They never fail to inspire and it seems each time we meet again I learn something new.  This list isn’t exhaustive and no doubt I’ve left out a few cherished ones, but these are among our current favorites – some older, some newer.

One last note: we’ve all got books on our selves that serve no other purpose but to make us look smart.  These are books you’ll actually read and use.

1.  Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it’s hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn’t read Steve Krug’s “instant classic” on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day. In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike. Don’t be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design.

2.  Content Strategy for the Web

If your website content is out of date, off-brand, and out of control, you’re missing a huge opportunity to engage, convert, and retain customers online. Redesigning your home page won’t help. Investing in a new content management system won’t fix it, either. So, where do you start?

Without meaningful content, your website isn’t worth much to your key audiences. But creating (and caring for) “meaningful” content is far more complicated than we’re often willing to acknowledge. Content Strategy for the Web explains how to create and deliver useful, usable content for your online audiences, when and where they need it most. It also shares content best practices so you can get your next website redesign right, on time and on budget.

3.  Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works (Interactive Technologies)

Ginny Redish, the technical communication guru, gives the most practical and useful advice about writing for the web.

4.  The Design of Everyday Things

Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans–from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools–must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human. It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.

5. Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research

Remote studies allow you to recruit subjects quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their on environment. In Remote Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.

Incidentally, there’s a honest and amusing review of “Remote Research” over at UX Magazine.

6. A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making

User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application—one that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of both the site owner and its users. But there’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, project management skills, and business savvy. That’s where this book comes in. Authors Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler show you how to integrate UX principles into your project from start to finish.

• Understand the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support
• Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives
• Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep
• Conduct user research and document your findings
• Understand and communicate user behavior with personas
• Design and prototype your application or site
• Make your product findable with search engine optimization
• Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance

7. Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout, registration, and any task requiring information entry. In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field’s leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging web forms.

NOTE: Everything put out by the folks at Rosenfeld Media is solid and imminently readable.

8. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web

How do we ensure that our Web sites actually give users what they need? What are the best ways to understand our users’ goals, behaviors, and attitudes, and then turn that understanding into business results? Personas bring user research to life and make it actionable, ensuring we’re making the right decisions based on the right information. This practical guide explains how to create and use personas to make your site more successful. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas takes you through each step of persona creation, including tips for conducting qualitative user research, new ways to apply quantitative research (such as surveys) to persona creation, various methods for generating persona segmentation, and proven techniques for making personas realistic. You’ll also learn how to use personas effectively, from directing overall business strategy and prioritizing features and content to making detailed decisions about information architecture, content, and design.

9. Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics

“Here’s Why All Serious Usability Professionals Are Reading This Book Now” You no longer need to justify usability. Buy this book and learn how these underground tools allow you to easily sneak usability into any organization. These methods always work. * Discover how to help your organization easily increase profits with UX. * Learn how to avoid the selling mistakes that can kill your usability career. * Transform skeptics and the enemies of usability into powerful advocates. * Advance your career and boost your influence without doing marketing. Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics is for usability professionals who are struggling to justify and sell their work to others.

10. Defensive Design for the Web: How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points

Let’s admit it: Things will go wrong online. No matter how carefully you design a site, no matter how much testing you do, customers still encounter problems. So how do you handle these inevitable breakdowns? With defensive design. In this book, the experts at 37signals (whose clients include Microsoft, Qwest, Monster.com, and Clear Channel) will show you how.

Defensive design is like defensive driving brought to the Web. The same way drivers must always be on the lookout for slick roads, reckless drivers, and other dangerous scenarios, site builders must constantly search for trouble spots that cause visitors confusion and frustration. Good site defense can make or break the customer experience.

In these pages, you’ll see hundreds of real-world examples from companies like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo that show the right (and wrong) ways to get defensive. You’ll learn 40 guidelines to prevent errors and rescue customers if a breakdown occurs. You’ll also explore how to evaluate your own site’s defensive design and improve it over the long term.

This book is a must read for designers, programmers, copywriters, and any other site decision-makers who want to increase usability and customer satisfaction.

At Normal Modes, we believe people like you have opinions that are worthy of compensation. Any chance you’d consider joining our national database of usability testing participants? It’s easy: You tell us what you think of a website or software application, and we give you cash or gift cards.

$100 Visa gift card giveaway

And that’s just the beginning. Between now and March 31, if you’ve got a complete profile in our user research database you’ll be eligible for weekly drawings for a $100 Visa gift card – just like the ones you’d receive during an actual study.

Giveaway details
In order to be eligible, your profile must be complete including optional questions. The giveaway ends on March 31, 2011 after which you’ll still be eligible for gift cards related to a study. The weekly winners will be randomly selected using your database key number and Random.org. The winners will be announced on a separate post each Monday and you’re advised to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you can be quickly notified when the winners announcement post has been published. Gift card giveaway sponsored by Normal Modes, and not affiliated, funded, or endorsed by Visa.

You’ve got answers. We’ve got questions.

Learn more about how user research works so you’ll feel comfortable with the process. And then sign up to volunteer for user research on websites and software applications.

Thanks!

And we hope you value our unique approach to creating memorable web experiences. If your organization ever finds itself in need of a such services, please get in touch to request a free user experience evaluation. We’d love to work with you.

Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.C.E.P., the director of the Rand Health unit of nonprofit policy-research group Rand Corp., believes that this will continue to be an area of focus and is placing his attention on what makes EMRs “easy to learn and easy to use by clinicians.”

Heck yeah. If there’s any industry that can benefit from great usability and interaction design, it’s medicine. Not only can the user (the doctor) benefit, but so can the user’s clients — the patients.

EMRs benefit hospitals economically and they benefit physicians with greater efficiency. But unless you’re in the medical field, your primary concern is most likely patient care. The portability of EMRs ensures that wherever you are, whichever doctor you’re seeing, your accurate and comprehensive medical history can be readily available. An optimal, well-designed and user-friendly user interface should be a priority during the development of an EMR.

Some good EMR and usability resources:

EHR Bloggers: This is a great general site about EMRs. The link I provided narrows down the posts to the usability category.

The EMR Usability Group: This group is dedicated to making EMRs as usable as possible. They provide online educational resources for the medical community. This post outlines their general ideas of how to make EMRs user-friendly.

HIMSS Report on EMR Usability (PDF): The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) EHR Usability Task Force’s report entitled, “Defining and Testing EMR Usability: Principles and Proposed Methods of EMR Usability Evaluation and Rating”.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/8pen-hopes-to-reinvent-the-mobile-phone-keyboard/?ref=technology

When designing a user experience either for the web or the real world it is good to use existing models to quickly communicate to the user how something operates.  This is why using a shrunken keyboard is the typical method of input for a mobile device.  But in a world where Microsoft Windows has dominated for 25 years is the best way always the “Windows” way?  Should we always use the standard keyboard?

In 2005 I purchased my first Mac laptop.  I have been a Microsoft user for most of my life and have written software for Windows computers for most of my professional career, but I wanted to see what the experience was like on the Mac.  I must say the experience was initially frustrating but in the end liberating.  The process was frustrating because I had to unlearn over 20 years of how a desktop operating system behaved.  I had to start thinking “What would be the best way to do this?” as if I were starting from scratch and in many cases that best way was the OS X way.  A great example of this is that on Mac OS X you use the Command Key (the Windows Alt key) as you would the Control key on Windows.  Initially this was frustrating but soon I realized how much more pleasant it was to use.  Right now type Ctrl+K and see how your left hand pivots to hit the Ctrl key.  Isn’t that kind of awkward.  Now type Alt+K and hit the Alt key with your left thumb by folding it in.  See how much more pleasant it is on your hands!

As always though we have to consider the user when designing our user experience. Should we constantly be changing the expected interface on a user just because something is slightly better?  What if every time you went to the ATM the buttons were moved just a bit or the color scheme was changed.  It would be horribly frustrating.  When I design a user experience and the design is something that breaks from the norm I ask myself, “Is this something that will be used with enough frequency that the user will benefit from the change?”  If they aren’t going to use it enough to become comfortable with the change it will just be frustrating.  But if it is going to be frequently used the change is probably worth it.

Maybe the 8pen keyboard is crazy, but if I use it enough it just may be what I’ve been looking for.

Guest author Rob Jefferies is President and founder of Compiled IQ a software consulting firm in the Houston area.

For me, the trunk organizer serves as a metaphor for user experience design. As I go through the project life-cycle, I like to work closely with my clients and their users. It’s important for me to keep everyone’s unique needs and ways of thinking at the forefront.

The web, by definition, is not a linear place. People don’t necessarily follow a process the way UX designers may have intended. I’m a so-called expert in usability and user experience, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to blindly follow a process that I’ve designed.

But…

It’s my job to make that application or web site work  – and work well — for all the users. It’s my job to make that trunk organizer collapsible, expandable, foldable and configurable in a way that facilitates use by each and every person who has to haul stuff home in the back their SUV.

Cost Savings
Testing with prototypes helps ensure that a re-designed web site won’t introduce more problems for the users.

Emphasis on Content
Wireframes place the emphasis on content and layout, rather than design. This helps decision-makers concentrate on information and communication, rather than colors and fonts.

Time Savings
More often than not, I’ve found that my team and the client has been able to spot potential pitfalls in a user experience during the wireframe stage. Wireframes are much easier to fix than full-color, fully-design Photoshop comps.

It’s Fun!
And finally…wireframing is fun. Yes, I know that might make me a geek. Check out this video if you still have any doubts.

So join us in celebrating on November 11. I bet there’s an event near you.

Center for Plain Language Workshop: 3 quick ways to see if users understand your content
Washington, DC
Celebrate World Usability Day with a stimulating afternoon on how to make sure that the people who read your documents, letters, announcements, and web pages can understand and use them. Learn and practice simple, low-cost techniques that you can put to work right away. This is a hands-on workshop.

CHIFOO UX Urban Scavenger Hunt
Portland, OR
Get ready for a new way to look at your urban surroundings. This will be a mobile communications usability-themed scavenger hunt that will allow you to explore the urban landscape of Portland, OR. Discover our local urban UI traps and treasures.

Michigan World Usability Day Conference at Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI
Michigan State University’s Usability/Accessibility Research and Consulting (UARC) will be hosting Michigan’s 6th annual World Usability Day event on November 11th at the Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center in East Lansing. This year’s theme will be Mobile Communication and will focus on the usability of websites on cell phones, tablets, PDAs, and other portable devices.

Northeast Ohio Usability Professionals’ Association (NEOUPA) World Usability Day Event
Independence, OH
NEOUPA will provide unique opportunities for WUD2010 participants, which include a combination of exciting speakers, workshop material, panel discussions and keynotes focusing on the WUD2010 theme, Communications. NEOUPA’s WUD2010 will address the impact of usability across numerous industries and industry providers. Participation includes speakers from Lands End, Medical Mutual of Ohio, American Greetings, ExactTarget, IBM.and more.

The Amazing Place: A TriUPA Communication Game
Cary, NC
World Usability Day 2010, on November 11, 2010, will focus on how products and services impact and facilitate communication around the world. Here in North Carolina, the Triangle Usability Professionals Association (TriUPA) and the Carolina Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) are teaming up to sponsor a communication game to encourage more communication among chapter members in addition to the annual World Usability Day celebration.

Typically, the debit card screens run through the following progression:

1. Swipe card.
2. Enter pin.
3. Do you want cash back? Yes or No. If no…
4. Is this amount OK? Yes or No. If yes…
5. Voila. I’m done.

This particular store’s machines work differently.

1. Swipe card.
2. Enter PIN.
3. Is this amount OK? Yes, No, or Cash Back.
4. Etc.

Whaaaaat? I wasn’t even paying attention, and I clicked “No” in step 3. Which meant that “No, this amount is not OK.” What I intended to say was, “No, I don’t want cash back.” The machine brought me back to the beginning of the process.

Apparently the machine’s GUI designers decided to combine two screens and therefore save their users a click. I didn’t save a click, though. I had to start all over.

Consider, please, the Principle of Least Astonishment (POLA), which states that “when two elements of an interface conflict, or are ambiguous, the behaviour should be that which will least surprise the user.” So for software GUIs, users form expectations based on their experiences with similar software.

The debit payment interface I encountered is a perfect example of why it’s so important for your design to conform to your users’ expectations. Saving a click is good practice — most of the time. But if your GUI’s behavior is counter-intuitive to your typical user, you’re just going to cause frustration and wasted time.

Resources about POLA

Principle of Least Surprise
Steve Smith
stevesmithblog.com

Principle of least astonishment
UXPassion.com

Applying the Rule of Least Surprise
Chapter 11. Interfaces
History of Interface Design on Unix

The cranky user: The Principle of Least Astonishment
Peter Seebach
For IBM.com

Most Astonishing Violation of the Principle of Least Astonishment
stackoverflow.com

Google is actually looking for more specific participants, but the TechCrunch article’s description is enough to pique your interest, yes?  It’s the general description that will have many people saying to themselves, “I’m over 18, use a PC, am willing to comply and could really use $75.”  Enough people will attempt to sign up that Google will then be able to select a representative sample of subjects.

What kinds of subjects might the company be looking for?  Here are some interesting, recent statistics on bloggers from the State of the Blogosphere 2009 report done by Technorati:

• Two-thirds are male.
• 60% are 18-44.
• 75% have college degrees.
• 40% have graduate degrees.
• More than half are married.
• More than half are parents.
• 68% have been blogging for two years or more.
• 86% have been blogging for at least a year.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging.
• 82% of respondents say that they post photos to their blog.
• 20% of all users have updated their blog or added content from their mobile device.
• 72% of respondents are classified as hobbyists, meaning that they report no income related to blogging.

These statistics already suggest some particular users that should be included.  For instance, naturally the study may target those between 18 and 44 years old, but there should also be participants older than 44.  Perhaps the study should include people who have never blogged before along with those who have been blogging for years.  There could also be both hobbyist and professional bloggers as subjects.  Depending on the features being tested, the study might involve users who update using a cell phone.  The study may even be very targeted and specific, looking at bloggers who spend 10 or more hours each week blogging.

The only way to ensure these populations are represented, though, is by having a preliminary survey.  Sure enough, Google’s includes questions about a volunteer’s gender, age, occupation, location, and how long he or she has been using Blogger, indicating that just because you don’t have to ask your parents’ permission to participate and you use a PC doesn’t mean you’re up $75.