Study roadtests political websites

By Staff Writer

New research has put the websites of the major political parties’ under the microscope to assess their usability and potential to help undecided voters gain information and insights.

The Hiser Group study involved expert design reviews of six websites, in tandem with usability testing by 12 undecided (swinging) voters – including a vision-impaired person, an immigrant of non-English speaking background and a person visiting the sites via a dial-up connection from their home in regional NSW.

The websites of the major political parties were reviewed in the research along with Google’s recently launched 2007 Australian Federal Election information site as an example of new media’s role in the election process.

Hiser’s study identified that each of the parties had improved their overall online delivery of information from the election in 2004 . However, there is still significant room for improvement.

Most improved site since the 2004 Election was the Liberal Party website according to the research in that it helped people to accomplish tasks. However it was found to be inaccessible on a dial-up connection in regional NSW.

The Greens and Nationals compared least favourably overall in comparison with their 2004 predecessor sites, with fixed, small pages on the Greens’ site hiding key content from users – including access to candidates’ names and profiles.to the research.

Web 2.0

According to the research, despite general improvements, all parties’ uptake of available technology is still lacking particularly when compared to the example set by the Google Election site for ways to interact with and engage users.

“The parties are still in an early, exploratory stage of using the web as a truly interactive communication channel, despite the ‘window dressing’ provided by online videos,” said Hiser Group principal consultant, Greg Ralph.

He said that people hated videos that started automatically every time they visited key pages.

“We had one person telling Bob Brown to shut up, while they tried to find the stop button.”

The Democrats’ site had particularly small and poor quality videos and the research found that in general websites could better integrate video content, without having to go to the YouTube website and risk losing their visitors – perhaps to other parties.

The Labor and Liberal sites faired best of the parties’ in their use of technology – they provide handy interactive tools to find candidates via postcode searches, screen-savers and even comics.

“The new interactive media known as ‘Web 2.0’ is more widely experienced – so the stakes have been raised since the last election.

“As a result, we were harder markers of sites’ interactivity and engagement – and the Nationals, Democrats and Greens were most downgraded in this aspect.”

Barriers to the disabled

Several of the websites surveyed presented access barriers to people with a hearing or visual disability, or who are in areas with poor bandwidth.

The Liberals’ site was largely inaccessible on a dial-up connection according to the research – a regional citizen gave up after five minutes of waiting for the images to download.

The Nationals’ site also had poor accessibility according to the study.

The Google Election site also presented barriers when used by a visually impaired person, with the experience leading him to readily give up on tasks.

The Labor site was a positive exception to this pattern providing a number of accessibility features, such as video transcripts, which also increases the ‘findability’ of their content by search engines.

Looks aren’t everything

While the Kevin07 website was one of the more interactive and visually pleasing sites, it failed with users the study found.

“Sadly, people didn’t think of it when they thought of the Kevin Rudd campaign, and they didn’t readily find it when they went to the place they did think of – the ALP site’s home page,” said Ralph.

“These sorts of issues can be readily detected through such testing. Based on our results, we suspect that these websites haven’t had the sort of exposure to representative voters (before their release) that is ensured in crafting electoral messages.”

What most surprised researchers was the performance of the Google Election website.

“While it was information-rich, this site was the worst offender in terms of usability,” said Mr Ralph.

“There is some ‘cool’ interactive functionality – as you would expect from Google – but presented in a way that undermines its use and understanding. People tried to interact with ‘dumb previews’ showing maps and interactive controls – and missed the intended pathways into these functions.”

The websites included in the study were:
• www.democrats.org.au
• www.greens.org.au/Election
• www.alp.org.au
• www.liberal.org.au
• www.nationals.org.au
• www.google.com.au/election2007

The full report is available at
http://www.hiser.com.au/verve/_resources/Evaluation_of_Australian_Political_websites_Hiser_research_report07.pdf