Misty McLaughlin

Did anyone catch the fantastic New York Times magazine story on Digital Intimacy two weeks ago? If not, it’s highly recommended reading for anyone who wonders how to get involved in This Thing Called Web 2.0, what kinds of motivators drive people to participate in online social networks, and why you should, too. Or not.

Clive Thompson gives some important milestones in the history of Facebook, from its early traditional pull-communication days (when you had to actually get online, navigate to Facebook, and look through your friends’ pages to find out what was going on with them – Old School, isn’t it?) to the evolution of News Feed, one of the first pre-Twitter push-communication mechanisms to actually deliver updates right to your…well, at least to one centralized place, your Facebook homepage. And then to your cell phone. And now, to your iphone, thanks to Loopt, Dopplr, Tumblr, Twitter, and the like.

In a nutshell, Thompson does a recent history of the collapse of push and pull communications into one concept called “ambient awareness,” or information delivery that’s integrated into our natural environments, rather than just the silo of your computer monitor. I love that this article speaks directly to many of us doubters, who wonder what could possibly be interesting about 20 updates a day on the quotidian, by explaining the sense of the subtle, the connectedness that can come from following someone else or blasting your own updates this way (aka microblogging).

(Confession: Yes, I did just stop writing this post to update Facebook. Misty is…writing a blog post on ambient awareness.)

I also appreciate, frankly, that this article takes on the division of intimate feeds versus more public presentation – one strategy for dealing with the social annihilation that too much of a good thing (too much information from people or causes you don’t care about, people who follow you assuming that they know you through your feed) can engender.

So what’s useful for nonprofits here? Well, back to Peter’s question of a few months ago: Should your organization have a Twitter strategy? In a nutshell, if I may weigh in: probably not. Twitter is a vehicle – not the trend or the impulse itself.

But should your organization have a strategy to promote ambient awareness of who you are, the work you’re doing, and how you’re changing the world? Well, yeah. If you can do it in a way that invites connectedness, community, and participation – Save the Baby Whales is…returning a beached Beluga to the North Atlantic – you have achieved the holy grail of Web 2.0.

To get you started, I recommend The Morning News’ rules for polite ambience (framed, of course, as all about Twitter Etiquette…ah well).

Current tally on our Presidential Hopefuls Online Scorecard: Obama 1 / McCain 0.

Thanks to Brandy Reppy for her expert rundown on each candidate's site's accessibility for visitors with disabilities.

Today, I’m going to rate JohnMcCain.com and BarackObama.com on their interactive pathways for engagement – in other words, what can I do to get engaged online, both before and after I become a supporter.

By now, we’re all used to seeing the “Get Involved” or “Take Action” utility boxes, usually at the right of the homepage, that tell us 5 ways we can support an org, 4 ways to act now, or one really important and three kind-of-but-not-quite-so important ways to get engaged. True to the genre of advocacy sites like the International Rescue Committee and FairTax, both Obama and McCain have chosen to present our interactive options clustered neatly in groups of 4 to 8 actions at the right of their design.

First, McCain’s Online Action Center. McCain opts for 8 routes to action, prioritizing donations and email signup – yes, an eCRM best practice – above six more involved paths to involvement. While he loses some points on the inclarity of a few options ("McCainSpace?" "Cause Greater Than Self?" what the - ?), the Action Center component gets a thumbs-up because it: prioritizes a low-cost way to get involved (email- and zip-only sign up) advertises the breadth of interactive opportunities on the site, without overwhelming, and persists throughout the site in the same location, providing reliable, handy routes to action. Even better, when I take that first step, something noticeable and relevant to me happens.

My Get Involved component becomes focused – instead of a cluster of ideas, I get a prioritized top-to-bottom list of what I should do, from least to greatest commitment, with (brief) annotations for each item so I know exactly what’s being asked of me. (Still, "A Cause Greater"? I must ask: "why so cryptic?")

Best of all is the information design of this component, which becomes a stand-in for my detailed Action Center dashboard. The horizontal white squares track my progress in each of these areas, allowing me at a glance to gauge my level of impact across many of my efforts.

Is anyone actually using this Action Center to this degree? I wonder. We’ll see how this plays out as the campaign unfolds, as people get engaged, and as these engagement tools are evolved based on what’s working and what’s not.

For now, JohnMcCain.com wins a point for strong engagement pathways.

Turning to My.BarackObama.com: Though this site is definitely a leader on many interactive fronts (beautiful design, clear areas of focus, strong nav), I was disappointed overall at the devices for getting engaged.

Obama.com does employ the interactive utility box (actually a couple of them) – to some degree the whole long right column is one big action-focused device – this is one area where more is less. To get to either this,

or to this:

you have to scroll way past this:

...which asks for participation in high-commitment activities like attending an event or donating, but doesn’t give you a sense of the breadth of ways to join or get involved. (Sign Up Now is happily included, but by this point you have already bypassed – or completed – signing up in order to enter the site in the first place).

After deciding to sign up for the rather unfortunately abbreviated my.BO.com, in which I must give my first and last name in addition to email and zip, I’m excited to see exactly one personalized item – a state-specific event finder – and some sort of small utility drop-down menu that’s hidden at the upper right. Otherwise, however, there’s nothing on most of the page that indicates that BarackObama.com actually knows that I’ve already signed up. My interactive options are the same (still presented way down on the page), and I’m still encouraged to sign up everywhere I look. Is that all there is: the chance to sign up?

Of course the site offers more, and if you can find your way to My Dashboard, an eight-item interactive box along with a complex "Activity Index" scoring system tells a different story of sophisticated online engagement opportunities. Still, what am I being asked to do with my Friends, Events, Messages, Groups, and Fundraising? My.BO.com is navigable, absolutely, and by doing some things like clicking on "Details" to learn about the scoring system or scrolling way down on the dash and clicking around to learn more about each opportunity, I’ll get there. But for such sophisticated pathways, this site is riddled with unnecessary barriers to entry that don’t give visitors a streamlined, personalized experience to grow their relationship with the campaign over time. So, alas…we’re giving this one to McCain for clear interactive engagement pathways. Which makes it:

Obama 1 / McCain 1.

Let us know what you’d like us to evaluate next – quality of email? Blog strategy? Navigation? Overall visual design? You name it, we’ll do our best to tackle it.

Now that we’re down to two (presumptive) presidential nominees, I have a modest proposal for you. It's time for us - all you bloggers out there; my esteemed colleagues; and you, dear reader - to take stock of what our candidates are doing online. How are they presenting themselves, how nimble are their websites in responding to what’s happening day-to-day, how effective are they as engaging us as supporters, donors, voters? 

We've written about the candidates websites as hotbeds of innovation, and about Lessons Learned (so far) from the '08 Campaign. Now I'm proposing...a little thing I call the Hopefuls Online Scorecard.

I'll start by posting scores (forthcoming) on a few best practices in website usability and engaging constituents online - stuff like overall experience, navigation, pathways to action, and quality of content. I'll ask you to post comments on the success criteria that matter to you - let's keep the tally rising.

Game on. McCain 0 / Obama 0. Watch this space.

I love 2008.

To put a finer point on it, I love this particular presidential election year in the U.S. For the first time, all of our serious commander-in-chief contenders understand that Campaign Central for the majority of American voters is their website.

What does this mean? User experience matters.

You probably know the best-and-worst of the candidate website stories: In 2004, Howard Dean’s innovation in the online world marshalled grassroots support, gave voters on-the-ground ways to mobilize and to feel connected (let’s hear it for video games!), raised some serious dollars (on the order of $40 million), and united a community of support that got the attention of every candidate on both sides of the aisle.

Both in 2004 and early in this election cycle, we also saw a host of questionable campaign website decisions. The Bush/Cheney campaign’s interactive online feature, “Make Your Own Lawn Sign,” and Jim Webb’s PAC’s “post your diatribe to our homepage” features* come to mind. Both took risks in soliciting user-generated content (hurrah for the risk-taking!) but neither managed to thoughtfully moderate that content, leading to a lot of self-sponsored candidate abuse.

Today, nearing the general election, we’re now down to three candidates who all seem to get that voters want more than an interactive brochure. As John Sutton of Navigation Arts puts it, presidential candidates are coming to see their websites as “roadmaps to permanence,” investing in “usability for victory” – the idea that an intuitive, inspiring, effective online presence will actively shape a candidate’s chances of long-term success.

This involves more than a slick design and airbrushed photos of candidates kissing babies. If JohnMcCain.com, BarackObama.com, and HillaryClinton.com represent the future of effective campaigning in the online space, they also hold a lesson for all of us nonprofit campaigners (political or no): research, innovate, test, and iterate. Whether it’s your message or your visuals or your grassroots tactics, the only way to get more effective online is to try an idea with your users/voters, carefully gauge their responses, and translate what you learn into change**.

That, after all, is the beauty of the Web, this quickly maturing, most democratic of spaces – it’s a great testbed for innovation. Watch this space in the weeks and months ahead for some play-by-plays of each candidate’s website, as they rapidly iterate towards the White House.

*Exact names of these features have been paraphrased.
**Not to be confused with “change you can count on”.

Last week, I attended the ever-wonderful  Information Architecture Summit, in pursuit of the latest tricks and trends for creating usable, intuitive web presences.

A few insightful sessions on Web traffic analytics have got me thinking about the myths we marketers, webmasters, execs, and development folks hold dear about our data. Whether it's Google Analytics, Visual Sciences, Urchin, Webtrends, Analog, Clicktracks - however you collect your data - these myths keep us from making the most of what our metrics can tell us.

Myth #1. Analytics tell us why our (inscrutable) users do what they do.

Traffic data gives us the "what" - and only part of the "what" - of how visitors use our site. It doesn't give us the "why." Yes, we can use the "what" of visitor behavior to speculate about the "why" of user motivation, but we don't know, for instance, why someone spends a particularly long time in a certain section of the site. Is she fascinated and reading every word - or so bored she walked away completely?

Myth #2. Accuracy is what we're shooting for.

If only. Analytics help us look for trends - not hard-and-fast, statistically significant numbers that can give The Irrefutable Facts. They do a great job of showing us growth or contraction over time, changing visitor behaviors, overall visitor loyalty. But the rules for how each analytics program collects data are constantly changing, which makes for good benchmarking, but, for instance, poor t-tests.

Myth #3. Traffic data is all numbers - hard quantitative stats, my friends.

Well, okay, you're right - in today's world, that's still mostly the case. When people talk about measuring and benchmarking traffic data, they're typically referring to big, impressive numbers.

But some of the most interesting developments in the analytics world are actually around qualitative user data, such as that collected through tools called Web Use Recorders. These tools record individual browsing sessions to give you a more qualitative view, from your constituents' perspectives, of your site: where their  attention is drawn, what content is overlooked, how they scan your homepage.

So now what?, you ask. If our traffic data doesn't tell us "why," isn't always accurate, and isn't "just the numbers," why do I analyze this data at all.

The answer: Triangulation with other user research methods and data sources. Traffic data is a critical - but singular - pillar of user research. Without alternative techniques like user interviews or surveys, usability tests or focus groups, even the best-laid plans of metricians and analysts can only answer part of the eternal question:

Who are our constituents, what do they want, and why do they do what they do online?