#nzvotes

[kieranstowers]

Hard at work again, there's an election next week and there's still people who need help to vote! A bit of shameless self-promotion—check out onthefence.co.nz and find out who you should think of voting for. Don't be a sheep! 🐏🚫 #nzvotes

[kieranstowers]

[designdemotf]

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.

#Firstly

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.

#Secondly

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.

#Thirdly

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.

[designdemaa-blog]

Launched!

It was a fantastic feeling getting Ask Away live on Friday, and it has been wonderful watching both people and the parties engaging with the site. We set ourselves a tight deadline and of course we have a lot more we’d like to do with the site, but the feedback has been very positive and in line with the things we have planned.

There have always been two questions critical to the success of Ask Away. The first is, will the politicians actually engage?

From today, the top question each day should be answered by all the parties, but I suspect it might take some of them a little while to get organised. Doing something new is always challenging, but hopefully we’re setting a precedent for how these things work in the future, and there are certainly a lot of good intentions!

The other thing that is going to help is seeing other parties active on the site - NZ First MP Tracey Martin went through last night and answered an amazing forty questions, showing everyone else how it’s done. I noticed people immediately encouraging the National party to keep up via Twitter.

Looking forward to @nznationalparty senior MP's answering soon on @AskAwayNZ. C'mon guys @TraceyMartinMP is making us look technophobic

— Joel Rowan (@RealJoelRowan)

August 10, 2014

I also enjoyed Tracey's way of answering, and would encourage spokespeople to use her conversational style, saying things like “Great question” or “As Chris said…”. We’re going to build in ‘likes’ for the answers so that we can see what people respond well to, but my hunch is that human, conversational answers will go down well.

@BMHayward @AskAwayNZ @suemoroney I am really loving this opportunity to answer questions - much better than speaking at people :)

— Tracey Martin (@TraceyMartinMP)

August 10, 2014

Of course, if that comes at the cost of a specific stance in the reply, I’d like to hope people will call it out, and, as journalist Megan Whelan said, “People like me are still going to be looking at the answers going - hold on, you didn’t really answer the question”. On that point, it will be very interesting to see how this content interacts with traditional forms of media.

The other, most important question is one which Matthew Beveridge raised in his blog post about the projects. “The real test will be if those who are not already politically engaged start to use them, or if they will just become tools for those who are already engaged”. So far, it’s likely that the majority of users are those who are already engaged, and that was always going to be the case to begin with.

However, with accessible questions like “Why is the cost of rent so high?” at number 5 on the trending list, I think this is going to be a good resource once there are a lot of answers on there to compare. Now that we have so many questions on the site, our marketing will change its messaging to be less about asking a question and more about the site as an easy way to compare the parties, specifically to target this less engaged audience.

At the very least, Ask Away is showing to anyone that visits it that the parties are interested and responding, and this impression will only increase as more answers come in each day.