[CivicAccess-discuss] 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
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