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