Tool ease of Use leads to users using it!

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

Last night I attended my friend Tina's Thanksgiving dinner. The guests were ladies who are artists, a retired homemaker & a 13 year old boy.  The demographic was 13, 30, 35, 44, 45 and 70.  None are bloggers, picture sharers or web experts, the boy used a number of tools. It was most interesting to see how they used the http://www.voteforenvironment.ca/ tool.  First they went to it because it was easy to find their riding, they got to readily see the boundaries on a map of their electoral riding and they got to see who the candidates were.  They were of course also interested in the politics behind the tool, but that was secondary.  Eventually Mom who normally voted a certain way, noticed that in her riding, to be strategic, it might be better to vote a different way, she most certainly was beginning to reconsider breaking her voting pattern for the past 4 decades for this election.  We wound up looking at a bunch of ridings to see the extent of their reach, looked at candidates, then drank more, then discussed possibilities!  There were no discussions about the algorithm, or the reliability of the tool or whose agenda was behind its creation and dissemination.

It was interesting that they did not go to elections canada and had not even considered doing so.  The Vote for the Environment marketing strategy, the tools useability and  aesthetic seems to have been very successful indeed reaching beyond the usual web gang and into non techy web users.

It was an interesting use case and a kind of guerrila human factors experiment.  It is probably worth while running some user studies with all the tools we develop to see how users interact with it and to solicit user feedback.

--
Tracey P. Lauriault
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

[Ilona Dougherty]

Tracey,

great story thanks for the note.

I agree, tools like this make voting more accessible.

elections canada has done a bad communications job, and doesn't have a good website, so people don't see that as a resource. that needs to change, I am hoping Apathy is Boring will be working with them over the next few years to help make that change.

we have noticed with our site (www.apathyisboring.com) it is all about making the information relevant to people, and accessible.

The Postal Code tool to find your MP is a critical one, and I really look forward to finding innovative ways to implement it between now and the next election.

A is B is really excited about the implications of having access to this tool.

Ilona

Ilona Dougherty

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Executive Director :: directrice générale   

Apathy is Boring :: L'Apathie C'est Plate

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10 Pins W. #412 :: Montreal, QC :: H2W 1P9 

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Apathy is Boring uses art and technology to engage youth in democracy. Help support our work!

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On 14-Oct-08, at 11:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:

Last night I attended my friend Tina's Thanksgiving dinner. The guests were ladies who are artists, a retired homemaker & a 13 year old boy.  The demographic was 13, 30, 35, 44, 45 and 70.  None are bloggers, picture sharers or web experts, the boy used a number of tools. It was most interesting to see how they used the http://www.voteforenvironment.ca/ tool.  First they went to it because it was easy to find their riding, they got to readily see the boundaries on a map of their electoral riding and they got to see who the candidates were.  They were of course also interested in the politics behind the tool, but that was secondary.  Eventually Mom who normally voted a certain way, noticed that in her riding, to be strategic, it might be better to vote a different way, she most certainly was beginning to reconsider breaking her voting pattern for the past 4 decades for this election.  We wound up looking at a bunch of ridings to see the extent of their reach, looked at candidates, then drank more, then discussed possibilities!  There were no discussions about the algorithm, or the reliability of the tool or whose agenda was behind its creation and dissemination.

It was interesting that they did not go to elections canada and had not even considered doing so.  The Vote for the Environment marketing strategy, the tools useability and  aesthetic seems to have been very successful indeed reaching beyond the usual web gang and into non techy web users.

It was an interesting use case and a kind of guerrila human factors experiment.  It is probably worth while running some user studies with all the tools we develop to see how users interact with it and to solicit user feedback.

--
Tracey P. Lauriault
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

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[Nicolas Marchildon]

Ilona Dougherty a écrit :

The Postal Code tool to find your MP is a critical one, and I really look forward to finding innovative ways to implement it between now and the next election.

A is B is really excited about the implications of having access to this tool.

With this it should be easy for site builders to add the lookup tool:

http://github.com/danielharan/canadian-postal-code-to-electoral-districts

Anyone know where voteforenvironment.ca got the riding boundaries? I could just scrape it, but I'd rather ask before I do so :)

[Daniel Haran]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Nicolas Marchildon
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> With this it should be easy for site builders to add the lookup tool:
>
> http://github.com/danielharan/canadian-postal-code-to-electoral-districts
>
> Anyone know where voteforenvironment.ca got the riding boundaries? I could
> just scrape it, but I'd rather ask before I do so :)

Those are freely available as shapefiles IIRC. A nice github project
would be a repository for files converted to KML ;)

d.