Candidate Guide

Background

Where we are coming from

Required information vs voter need

There are many voter guides out there. Looking online offers a plethora of info. Some information is of questionable veracity. The local online news site even has a guide to the guides.

 
Perhaps the most familiar guide in our area is the booklet that the County mails out to all registered voters. In our user testing, most participants refer to this guide as an important source of information. This booklet is lengthy. It serves many purposes, and candidate information is only a small part of what it has to offer.

Information is easily buried in a guide of this nature. Voter usability is not a focus.

How can voters make an informed choice in a reasonable amount of time that is unbiased and revealing?

We wanted to provide an alternative to county produced guides, which have to serve numerous roles.

Early insights

In our research we found that 83% of voters still prefer a paper guide. We started there. Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission produced a paper Candidates Guide. It was a color spreadsheet with candidate photos and candidate submitted information.

This guide includes information on whether the candidate is participating in public financing and a link to see all funding sources.

Is the candidate guide usable

Poorly framed information will slow people down, give a bad impression, and cause errors. The time and energy spent discovering information leading to a decision translates directly into voter frustration, apathy, misinformation and possible abandonment.

I was part of a team that user tested the paper guide. We set up tables and clipboards at a branch of the Oakland Public Library and spent an afternoon engaged in qualitative user testing. 

• Layout

The row headers at 90° were a much maligned layout feature, and participants could not remember the content categories from row to row and column to column.

• Extraneous additions

There was a map of the district on the upper right corner and a place to write your ranked choice candidates at the bottom. Both features were unclear to our test participants and were seen as “clutter”.

• Unclear logic

Participants were unclear on the meaning of “Public Financing” and what the checkmark meant. The QR code destination was not clear - the url below and the text were at odds.

Improved paper guide

We addressed the issues that our research had found.

The layout became much clearer and stronger through elimination of the 90° row headings and the addition of sub headings for each candidate and each category. The map and the ranked choice voting write-in were taken away. The public financing logic was corrected and presented with unbiased language. Finally, the QR code was situated next to the url and a description.