Lead Designer's Reflections
We are aware of our limitations. Absolutely, the site needs to be optimised and constantly improved, we appreciate feedback and believe it is critical to delivering a better product. The design process does not stop at the big ‘reveal’—having the weekend to stand back and watch, there are a number of things we can observe.
By examining events on Twitter (where most of the conversation around On the Fence seems to be occurring) the first is that our original hunch from 2011 still appears to be true: older users (30+) with established voting habits/choices will use On the Fence to verify their beliefs, and when a different point of view or another party is presented to them, they find it quite confronting:
On the other hand, younger users, especially non-voters find the web tool incredibly helpful and it gets them thinking about issues that had previously never been on their radar.
However, we understand the difference between ‘simple’ and ‘simplistic’.
On the Fence attempts to take heavy, philosophical, ethical and political concepts and translate them into a language (visual and non-visual) that young, non-voters will understand. It’s also meant to be a playful look at a serious subject—we don’t believe its patronising, and it’s certainly not our intent to treat adults like children. 18 year old voters are legally adults, however, they have never voted before so the obvious design tension we faced was to balance the gravity or mana of the subject and the fun gameplay. Matthew Beveridge comments that the 2014 On the Fence addresses this tension quite well. Being ruthlessly quick, with less emphasis on graphics and entertainment and more on content and delivering more meaningful results.
We do recognise, however, that the algorithm will improve over time as policies become available, party lines become clearer and the assembled panel see the need to adjust the back-end data to reflect this. On the Fence will always try to be fair and transparent to all political colours, our intent is simply to assist young non-voters to engage with politics and voting.
An area of contention is the statements. To be clear, these are not questions. Under each policy category, two deliberately polemic statements are given. The user is then invited to indicate how much they agree with each statement (one at a time) by moving a slider on a continuum. Though we realise this is forced, and the slider mechanism is very different to the 2011 version. But, as a sandbox questionnaire, it is still able to capture the same data. More work and tweaking is needed to find the right combination of slider notches (to allow for more nuance), semantics (lil bit, sorta, yeah nah, hardout etc..) and the statements themselves, we believe that a slider system is able to capture far more data and nuance than a forced-choice questionnaire.
Our attempts to improve the slider mechanic, while aggregating more data from the panel members over time will generate more accurate results.
The On the Fence web tool is only meant to be a starting point for a lifetime journey of political engagement. Think of it this way: no (responsible) parent would put their child on a bicycle, and say ‘have a go’. This is comparable to how young, inexperienced voters feel about political engagement, especially in New Zealand. They have no starting point, no one to guide or educate them about voting or what each of the parties stand for (without confusing them by talk of specific policies, which change before and after elections).
On the Fence puts ‘trainer wheels’ on the future for young people, and guides (while provoking) discussion, research and even debate—all necessary elements for a healthy democracy.
On the Fence does not work in isolation either. Together with initiatives such as Ask Away, the policy categories act as a conduit for political discussion. Those who want to delve deeper into a particular topic are able to read direct responses from political leaders to user’s questions. In time, this builds up an assortment of skills needed: critical thinking, research, discourse. Working in collaboration with other initiatives also provides transparency and accountability—as On the Fence does not (and cannot) explicitly tell the user who to vote for, it is up to the individual to do the considering before September 20th. For the moment, On the Fence is doing exactly what it set out to do: it is engaging young non-voters in political thinking and discussion in a fun way, it is provoking discourse around politics and voting and is working together with other initiatives to provide a suite of resources to help guide voters in to the future.
Finally, for every critic, there are many more who appreciate what we are trying to achieve. This is encouraging!
Fa’afetai tele lava mo le lagolagoina o lenei fa’amoemoe
Thank you for all your support so far.
Kieran Stowers is Junior Research Officer and Lead Designer at the Design & Democracy Project, and tutor in Visual Communication Design at Massey University College of Creative Arts.
