(Republished from Carsonified’s Think Vitamin)

Beautiful profile illustrations by Kyle Steed

Stories that begin with, “It all started at SXSWi . . . .” always seem to end in something appropriately best describe in webtalk as “EPIC.” It’s true, in spite of excessive commercialization, long lines, and the frenetic schedule of panels and parties, magical stuff happens in Austin.

Tools like Twitter, Dribbble, and newcomer Forrst have further accelerated and facilitated serendipitous meetings between designers. Suddenly we’ve become a lot more connected to one another, and by connected I mean a variety of things; we’re connected by:

• Conversation
• Content
• Conferences
• Web standards
• New technologies

All of these exciting interactions have led to an explosion in tech culture camaraderie, which brings me to the story of “Design Swap,” a new experiment dreamed up and piped out by designers Trent Walton, Austin, TX, and Yaron Schoen, NY, NY. Read the rest of this entry »

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With voter engagement in local elections dropping to it’s lowest rates in history, I reviewed NYC mayoral candidates Bill Thompson and Mike Bloomberg’s websites on the eve of this year’s election to see if/how both candidates leveraged web apps to encourage voter participation.

There are 4.5 million registered voters in NYC, and in both a close and controversial race the turnout was an abysmal and historical low,  557,059 voters for Bloomberg v. 506,717 for Thompson.

Thompson2009.com and MikeBloomberg.com are saturated with red, white, & blue graphics and personal branding. Neither site is particularly innovative or effective in terms of innovative online-to-offline engagement.

As you can see both sites leveraged a staple set of social icons. Bloomberg’s site encouraged social media users to “donate” their Twitter and Facebook status updates on election day and Thompson leaned towards pragmatic design and provided a link to help voters locate their polling places.

If Facebook apps can inspire people to buy/give virtual gifts and even try on random hair styles, can a web app get someone out to vote in a local election? I believe it can, and if this year’s turnout proves anything, it’s that there’s a great opportunity for developers, designers, and campaigns to innovate with apps.

Charles Lenchner and NYC’s Working Families Party bootstrapped and designed “Candidate Finder.” Proving that simple can be sexy, a voter can input her street address and zip code, data magic happens, and she can share, download, print the list of candidates WFP supports in her district and get directions to her polling place.

Pre-submit page

Post-submit page

Lenchner, NYC’s WFP, and Candidate Finder bring me back to heavy-hitters Thompson and Bloomberg (and Bloomberg’s 100,000,000 budget). I believe that web apps (including bootstrapped ones) matched with smart outreach and online uptake can become a major asset towards can help reengage voters at the local government level (in an effort to change the world).

10 tips for developing the next generation of political apps

1. Data-Hungry Devs Must Diet

Provide a data-driven activity to get the voter to the polling place (ex. WFP’s Candidate Finder). Data-hungry folks, suppress your appetite for demographics. It’s not about you;)

Don’t ask for more information than you need (sure, it’s  you’re user dropoff will increase with the addition of every field, and the experience is about the user and getting her what she needs to vote.

2. Imitate, Integrate, or Borrow From “Four Square”

Provide a validation activity (like Foursquare’s badges) for the voter post-polling (think of this as a virtual “I Voted!” sticker, but with the power of publication and dissemination across the web).

These activities can have tiers: be the first to vote, be the 100th voter, be the last to vote. Together this data can become a story of a community of users who can have a fun time spurring one another on throughout the day.

3. Meme, Mob, and Maybe Mock With Fun Activities

Provide a mechanism for people to self-organize and go to polling places in groups (not everyone feels comfortable alone) or create a group-like activity that people can participate in.

• Enable voting day meetups with organizers (organizers should be able to download and print recs for who to vote for via your app)
• Seed flash mob-like experiences (everyone shows up to vote wearing fedoras at 10AM, which makes for
  great content for reporters)
• All users to design neighborhood-themed photo activities outside of polling places (e.g. Brooklyn hipsters take a photo of yourself in an ironic tee-shirt or Yankee Fans wear your gear and voters should upload to the app’s pool throughout the day)

4. Create a Feedback Loop Around Local Issues

Provide a feedback mechanism for people to get answers (keep it simple let users ask “yes/no” questions). Recycle the answers and data.

5. You Lose Your Virginity Once, But In Politics You Have Primaries

Your app should engage your audience for more than a day, in fact, it should inspire a community who can in turn inspire each other to get out an vote. Experiment leading up to the primaries, optimize, and keep delivering an awesome experience.

6. Keep it Simple, but Leverage Advanced User Personas and Segmentation

Place focus on simple issues that impact voters’ bottom lines (Vote “YES” against fare increases). Voters get mired in the complications and local votes are for compelling local issues.

Your app should speak to a set of personas and the segmentation of what impacts the users’ bottom line.

• I’m a parent – what matters?
• I’m a single person – what matters?
• I’m retired – what matters?
• I’m unemployed – what matters?
• I have no health care – what matters?
• I’m the neighborhood curmudgeon, everything matters, but
  nothing makes me happy – what matters?
• I’m the neighborhood gossip – what’s the juiciest issue?

Identify a single compelling issue according for each and leverage that message repeatedly.

7. Get Your Google Map On

Provide an address, directions, and a map to the voter’s local polling center (sms, email, print, and invite the user to invite her friends/neighbors to join you on voting day).

8. Provide “What to Expect” When You’re Expecting Voter Turnout

Some people have never voted in a primary or a local election, while other people like to plan. Tell your users/voters what to expect:

• When are the busiest times
• What should voters bring to identify themselves
• Will there be Wi-Fi access (if there’s a line?)
• What should voters tell their employers?

9. Translation Party

Build your app with multiple translations based on what most of your the constituents.

10. Accountability Analytics Are Awesome

Voting isn’t the end of the local politics process. Create a post-election utility similar to Politifact’s Obamameter, which is tracking Barack Obama’s promises and rating the progress of each one.

Your app should keep the community you cultivated engaged around how currently elected officials are doing and if they’re keeping their promises.

If your app was designed to support a democrat, who didn’t win, flip it to track how the republican elect is doing and how it’s impacting the same issues your audience was encouraged to get out and vote on). By doing this you’ll also be able to continue to grow your community, making your app’s potential to be stronger and have greater reach in the next set of elections.

With American engagement in local politics at a historical low the frontier for app development is wide-open. Bloomberg spent $100,000,000 on his campaign, Lechner and WFP spent a few thousand dollars on something smart, user-friendly, and simple.

Back over to you, what kind of app would you build to help influence engagement around local issues, encourage and increase voter turnout, and most importantly help change the world in the process?

(Disclosure, I played a small role in Candidate Finder’s development with friends at Fission Strategy)

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Originally published on Carsonified’s Think Vitamin Blog (many thanks Ryan!)

“Doh! %&^%&^%&!”

Another forehead-smack-worthy curse-laden moment: I’ve filled out a lengthy online form and hit the submit button only to find myself staring back at an empty form peppered with red errors. Has this happened to you? Of course it has.

While considering how much I really need to complete this form, I start making notes on how I’d design it to be a better experience. Seriously, how many date formats am I going to have to try before I get this sucker right? Do I need to phone a friend?

The lack of strong error messaging is a regular issue I encounter as both a user and UX designer. As the bearer of bad news to users, error messaging can be the element that determines whether your app gets a “Sale” or “FAIL.”

1. Error messaging is customer support
Error messaging is a critical component of customer support. Customer support teams are experts at talking to and coaching users towards conversion and success.

While QA hustles to break it down, customer support can work side-by-side to craft sensible messaging around those scenarios. The result? More sales, fewer customer calls and complaints.

Some mistakes (e.g. date formats, passwords, emails, forgotten fields) are both predictable and recurring mistakes that cannot be prevented by better design. Design the outcome to encourage the user to engage with the app’s voice, correct her mistakes, and move onwards.

2. No one ever died of humility
While it can be tempting to assume that the user is at fault when an error is made, it’s also possible that the process wasn’t clear enough in the first place.

Error messaging should be concise, friendly, and knowledgeable, but also employ humility, empathy, and apology. I personally love Firefox’s “well this is embarrassing” statement. I tend to crash my OS frequently, and it’s not FF’s fault, yet every time FF makes the assumption that I’m not at fault.

3. Bake with cookies!
Among the most unforgiving experiences occurs when a user fills out a form and having all her data it wiped out for having forgotten or mis-typed field. If you’re not a banking institution you don’t have the luxury of abusing your user by dumping her data.

Save as much information as is possible and safe for your user (e.g. re-fill everything possible with exceptions for passwords, TOS, etc.), and then clearly mark the areas your users need to correct. Saving user data will reduce user annoyance and the chances that she’ll abandon the process.

4. Don’t cheap out
Don’t cheap out on design when it comes to error messaging. Users who hit error messages are helping your team learn how to optimize your product.

Do use this as an opportunity to build a relationship and engage with humor. You can soften the feeling with typeface and words that don’t alarm, humiliate, or annoy.

Do use resourceful and helpful iconography to reduce the amount of words.

5. Error messages are not features
As great as your app’s error messages may be, they aren’t supposed to become legacy features.

Assign a team member to study the error logs. Learn what happens when your users make mistakes and constantly optimize.

• What fields were incorrectly filled out?
• What did the users put in those fields or forget to put in those fields?
• How many sessions do your users log?
• What’s the abandonment rate?

Error messaging can be the simple tweak that influences your bottom line (conversion), so it’s worth ongoing evaluation and investment.

6. Everyone loves the funny guy
It’s easy to hide behind a great sense of humor, but it’s also easy to distract your user. Use low-key and relative humor like icanhazcheeseburger.com that doesn’t overshadow the error messaging itself.

7. Choose helpful over cute
Error messaging should be more helpful than cute. CushyCMS’s “Wharrgarbl” was only amusing and forgivable the first time I saw it, by the third time I was annoyed and still couldn’t figure out what the source of the problem was.

8. Go behind the browser
If you are low on resources or without customer support, integrate your error messaging within the user’s browser. This will force the user to stop and read what she’s doing incorrectly. Oddly, I’ve seen users mutter and blame the browser versus themselves or the app.

9. Don’t play hide-and-seek
Bring your user directly the area where the problem is. Meetup.com has fantastic messaging, but unfortunately during the sales process, they bring the user back to the top of the page, when the error is well below the fold. This causes the user to pause and think versus correcting and moving forward.

10. Don’t design single-size error messaging
One size error messaging is a bad idea. If a user has failed to put a size or choose a color of a purchase she wants to make on zappos.com, the error message should point out that specific issue versus being popped into the “Item Out of Stock” skin used elsewhere across the site (@zappos – please fix!).

Error messaging occurs when a user makes a mistake (dumb user) and it’s an element of your app’s design that can keep the party going or literally result in a lost sale.

If there were one thing I’d like you to take away from this article it would be that you go back to your team and talk about and revise your error messaging, and then let me know what the results are. My prediction is that writing hero-worthy error messages will result in improvement and lift across your sign-up, sales, and data gathering processes.

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