Call Now - 888.956.6337 What the People Want – the GOP and Voter’s Experience with Campaign Websites
Investigating the Voter Experience with Republican Candidate Websites
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
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