Usability on the Campaign Trail

After reading “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug and “Prioritizing Web Usability” by Jakob Neilsen, I became inspired. I thought it might be fun to do a little user testing of my own on this year’s campaign trail. Since usability is concerned with how easy, effective and efficient a user’s interaction is with a particular website, I thought I’d see which candidate (in my view) had the most user-friendly website. In creating a usability test for this exercise, I tried to think about what tasks most voters in America might be interested in doing while visiting the websites. Here are the 3 tasks I finally decided to try on each site:

1) Find out the latest news on campaign’s progress
2) Find out how to join or contribute to the campaign
3) Find out the candidates policy on the economy

Then I scored each site (5 points possible) on the following:

1) Overall design
2) Content
3) Structure
4) Navigation

Here are my results:

John McCain
http://www.johnmccain.com
User is greeted by an opening screen asking for your email address, but the site does provide a click thru to the main homepage if you do not choose to share your email info. The main homepage is nicely laid out, with a good text/background contrast making the site easy to read. Page is divided into clear sections and joining the campaign and donating are both clearly indicated on the top right. There is a news box on the main page with links to John McCain’s most recent statements as well as links to press releases, news and speeches. His position on the economy was easily found on a dropdown menu at the top of the main page which allowed a voter to click through and read his stance on various tax and economic issues. Overall a nice site with all information easy to find at a glance. Overall score – 24/25

Barack Obama
http://www.barackobama.com/index.php
Like McCain’s site, you are met with an opening screen asking you to join the movement and provide your email address. A “skip signup” button is provided to click on through. Once inside, Obama’s homepage evokes heavenly blues and whites with touches of red on key buttons such as “donate now” or “apply now.” The color scheme is really quite nice. The main page contains several boxes although they are not clearly labeled. It is necessary to scroll down to find the news and events boxes which I didn’t like. It was easy to find his position on the economy thanks to a drop down menu labeled “Issues.” I expected to find Obama’s site the best of the three and in looking for information quickly; his site did not live up to my expectations. It took me longer to find what I was looking for on this site. Another annoyance was the back button was disabled forcing me to close the window rather than to click back out. Overall score - 22/25

Hillary Clinton
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/
Surprise, surprise! Another annoying opening screen asking for me to give out my email address. However once inside at the main homepage, the structure and layout of the site is nice and straightforward. The main page is divided into clear definable sections making information easy to locate. Buttons to join and contribute are easy to see and clearly clickable. Like Obama she also had “Issues” as part of a drop down menu located across the top of the page. The labels on the drop down menu should be more succinct like Obama’s who only lists one word (i.e., economy, war, etc) – which I think is better. News was also found on the main page and did not require any scrolling. Overall score - 23/25

Despite the fact that I am a Democrat, I honestly (and surprisingly) liked John McCain’s site the best. Obama’s was more pleasing to look at than Hillary’s but Hillary’s site had a more straightforward and clearly defined layout making information quicker to access. Hillary only gained a point over Obama due to his site's disabling of my back button, otherwise it would have been a tie. Isn’t it odd that the findings in this usability test have an uncanny resemblance to the current state of affairs on the campaign trail?