Sorry to all the political junkies out there about the absence of any new posts. So much has been happening both online and in meatspace, and I hope I get a chance to blog about some of it before the news cycle leaves me in the dust.

Exciting news! As of Sunday, the Change website and posters have gotten a redesign. I was looking forward to some content addition under the triangle arrows pointing to “campus life,” “social justice,” “advocacy,” and “save your money.”. (Have they always done the blinky rotation?? I’ve only just noticed it writing this post) The Stronger Together website seems considerably more information-rich in contrast (even if it’s just better layout and copy-writing), I would have thought one of the more pressing priorities would be a presenting their campaign platform in another way than a straight page of text.

Another design element that I really question is the placement of candidate videos. The clips are placed vertically in a row, one after another, requiring the user to scroll down through the page to access each video. Someone who has studied the psychology of graphic design could probably speak better to this than I could but there is a clear sense that the candidates are being ranked in some hierarchy – whether it’s importance, level of responsibility, involvement in the campaign, or some other metric. Steve Masse for President at the top. This unfortunate formatting is compounded by the lack of website space for the individual candidates. Nowhere are any of their names even mentioned on the website other than as the title of the youtube videos. What is up with that?!

As expected, the effect of the video layout can be seen in the number of views each videos get. As of posting time, Steve Masse on the Change slate has 1105 views, far surpassing any other members of the Change team. Adam Awad’s video, on the other hand, has only about 100 more views than three other members of the Stronger Together Slate, all of whose videos are within ten views of each other.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 3:26 am and is filed under Events, On Campus, Politics, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.