User Experience - the Secret Weapon of the 2008 US Election?

Traditional political wisdom segments the electorate into three basic populations: ‘us’, ‘them’ and swing voters. Political campaigns focus their get-out-the-vote operations on the ‘us’ and swing segments and ignore the rest. But in 2004 the Republican National Committee used sophisticated data mining to target individual voters. The data-driven, voter-to-message targeting effectively swung both local and national elections. By 2006 the democrats had geared up their own microtargeting operations including Catalist - a subscription-based data-mining service for progressive organizations.

Jump to the present day, and organizations like Catalist are enhancing their services further using techniques borrowed as much from the iPhone as from traditional data processing. The iPhone is special not because of what the iPhone does, but how it does it - the user experience. For Catalist, the secret weapon of the 2008 get-out-the-vote campaign will be an enhanced user experience that makes the complex task of cross-referencing voter registration information with commercial data, more intuitive and more accessible, to more people.

The "Q Tool" is Catalist's web-based application for creating queries, cross-referencing results and exporting findings. It is intended to help campaigners do things outside their normal expertise (i.e. complex data analysis) and guide them through a decision making process they wouldn't be able to do on their own. Yet if the application has too steep a learning curve, it negatively affects their experience and their relationship with Catalist.

Catalist contacted Catalyst Resources of San Mateo, CA to help them optimize the user experience for the Q Tool. Catalyst Resources updated the application with an intuitive visual presentation of districts and selections as well as a map representation. User validation testing of the Q Tool showed that the existing tabular presentation was slow and confusing to users. Catalyst Resources re-engineered the display, adding visual clues that progressively lead users through the application, as well as adding colour and shading, and embedded explanatory messaging. With the enhanced user interface for the Q Tool, and continually refreshed political and commercial data, Catalist will provide progressive organizations in 2008 with microtargeting capabilities on par with the Republican Party's best efforts.

"With a sophisticated data mining engine and the right user experience for manipulating it, progressive organizations can locate supporters and predict the impact of campaign activities with a new level of precision and accuracy" said Laura Quinn, CEO of Catalist.

Associated Link: Catalyst Resources

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