A quick online usability study of the Obama and McCain websites was conducted on November 3rd and 4th, 2008.\u00a0[Note:\u00a0 Passive must be avoided – Ed.<\/em>] Preparation for the study took about 2 hours and data analysis took about 4 hours.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI should point out that Usability Testing is a part of what I do for\u00a0a living.\u00a0 We’ll come back to this.<\/p>\n
One of the key questions you have to ask when doing a usability test is “what is the user trying to accomplish?”\u00a0\u00a0 These tasks should, ideally, reflect things the the user actually would need to accomplish<\/em> using your website, software, hardware, store design or whatever it is you’re testing:\u00a0<\/p>\nParticipants were asked to do four tasks on one of the sites: find where to vote, find the candidate’s position on Social Security, find a photo of the candidate waving, and find the impact of the candidate’s tax plan on them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m trying to picture someone trolling the web thinking “I need to find a picture of Barack Obama waving to a crowd.\u00a0 Where, oh where…<\/em>“.\u00a0 But three out of four ain’t bad.<\/p>\nThe next step is qualifying and quantifying your results:<\/p>\n
Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two sites; 44 of them completed the tasks. Task success (self-reported), task times, and task ease ratings were collected, as were ratings on several scales, including the System Usability Scale (SUS).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Pay no attention to the terms of art among Usability geeks;\u00a0let’s jump to the results:\u00a0<\/p>\n
Overall, the users were successful with 78% of their tasks on the Obama site<\/strong> but only 47% on the McCain site<\/strong>. Users of the McCain site also took 28% longer and rated the tasks as 27% more difficult. Users rated the Obama site as being significantly easier to find information on and significantly more visually appealing. And the Obama site received a mean SUS score of 76% compared to 45% for the McCain site. Usability issues with both sites were identified from user comments. Overall, it was a landslide usability victory for the Obama website.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nJust a quick note to whomever runs for President in 2012; the little things count.\u00a0 And I know a few conservative usability geeks that’d love to lend a hand getting that <\/em>particular problem solved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the dominant memes in GOP circles since November 5 has been “the need to use the internet better”.\u00a0 And while that’s a fairly big, amorphous concept, there is at least one empirical measure of the Obama and McCain campaign’s successes (other than online fundraising, although someone really should investigate all those millions in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}