USPS

Deliver The Win

Uncovering the best ways to provide campaign resources to political candidates of all sizes

Project Goal

Provide recommendations on ways to better match political candidate or campaign manager needs with this website's offering

Introduction

Context

Deliver the Win is an online resource that provides campaign outreach and marketing information for political candidates, campaign managers, and other political actors, and is provided in partnership with USPS (and Booz Allen Hamilton, the primary contractor on this project). I worked with Mark Becker and Bill Saiff (lead researchers) to conduct research and provide insights on this site, which were then presented to business drivers and key decision makers in January 2021.

Our specific goals were to chart any differences in user needs between roles, party, and region, test the site's content hierarchy and recognition, map logical groupings between content and test the live site to uncover insight into how to best adapt the site to meet the needs of political actors. 

We tested 40 participants throughout December 2020. Each session lasted aproximately 70 mintues. 20 of these participants took part in a card sort, which provided valuable insight into how the site's content should be grouped and organized, while the other 20 took part in a cognitive walkthrough of the site, in order to understand how best to adapt the site to meet their needs. 

My Role

My specific role was centered around conducting cognitive walkthrough testing (although all team members were involved with every aspect of testing). During each cognitive walkthrough, I applied my personal moderation style, adapted from Rogerian Therapy, focusing on restating a participants comments and allowing them to elaborate. For analysis, card sort data was analyzed using Dendrogram and Cluster methods, and cognitive walkthrough data was analyzed using Content Analysis and Grounded Theory methods.

Project Briefing

Walk-through of site

Cognitive Walk-throughs conducted

Card Sorts Conducted

Analyzing Data

Presenting report to stake-holders

Initial Briefing, Walkthrough

Deliver The Win was created to help candidates break through political noise and win their campaigns. Now it was trying to break through the noise itself, and be an accessible, non-partisan resource that campaigns large and small would turn to when creating political strategy. Before they added more content to the site, they turned to my company to help answer a few questions:

• How did users feel about the information this site offered compared to the other resources available to them?
• How do the needs of users differ? What's important to a campaign manager vs. the candidate themselves?
• Do users understand the navigation, and do the categories make sense to them?
• What parts of the site's UX causes frustration or confusion for users?
  

After an initial discussion with the Deliver the Win team, I conducted a usability heuristic evaluation of the site, as I had never visited it before, to prepare for testing and note tasks where users were likely to struggle.

Contextual Interviews

Part of the testing process that all participants went through was a contextual interview. We talked to people who had held positions in political campaigns or races over the last 2 election cycles, and asked them questions about the types of campaign methods they used, how they used them, and what type of information they would expect to find on a site like this.

Cognitive Walkthroughs / Card Sorts

After completing the contextual interview, participants either explored the site during a cognitive walkthrough, or provided feedback on the site content during a card sort.

Cognitive walkthrough participants gave us data on which parts of the site caused frustration or confusion, as well as how the exisiting navigation performed. Card sort participants gave us data on how users' needs and mental model differed, depending on their role in a campaign, as well as how they preferred to group and organize the site's content.

Understanding The Users:

1. Door to Door and direct mail are king.

We found that the two most common, and most effective, campaign outreach strategies involved door-to-door and direct mail outreach. This was in line with previous research and assumptions we had made about our users, and justifies design decisions made about direct mail, both the amount of emphasis and level of detail provided on the site.

2. Direct mail was not commonly tracked, and the effectiveness was hard to quantify.

Although 92% of our participants had used direct mail before, there was no clear way to track the delivery progress of these 'mailers', and no real way to quantify their effectiveness. Only 5% were aware that USPS (a partner of Deliver The Win) provided a free tracking service that provides mailers notifications as each mail piece, bundle, tray, sack, and pallet is processed and scanned throughout the postal network. This led to participants developing workarounds to gauge when their mailpieces had made it to voters, including one campaign manager who described sending interns to local post offices and having them dig through trash to try and find their campaign's mail.

3. The smaller the campaign, the larger the role social media played.

Smaller or more local campaigns mentioned social media as a key part of their campaign strategy 75% of the time, while medium size or larger campaigns only though social media played a key role 23% of the time. The important conclusion for Deliver The Win to draw is that these small users will gravitate to outreach methods with easy ease of access, broad reach, and inexpensive cost, and direct mail should be marketed as such on their site.

Providing Context:

Users didn’t immediately understand the context for the site, and the information it provided. Some thought it was an e-commerce-like site where they could buy direct mail services and/or research and data, instead of a resource that provided information on those topics.

In the hero section was a video which provided the context participants wanted, however most participants indicated they would normally not watch videos on sites like these, and the info in the video was not available anywhere else on the site. 
The fact that the rest of the site was so easily identifiable and contained content familiar to participants was quite likely discouraging users from watching this video. Their thought process was "Since most of the site is so easy to understand, why would I need to watch the video?" 

Our Solution-
Recrafting the hero section would help frame the purpose of the site in the visitor's mind at first glance. This recrafted section should give users an idea of how the content of this site will “help drive voter action.” Pulling key ideas from the hero video would also provide additional context, and would prevent it being a neccessity for users to watch the video. 

Information Architecture & Navigation

Their were several issues with the 'Carousel' navigation, and the buttons which controlled it on the site. There was a large disconnect between these buttons, as participants couldn't identify what these labels meant, or how to use them to control the 'carousel'. When moving from category to category, they experienced a 'shuffling' animation as content was switched over. This reminded participants of a shuffling deck of cards, and caused many participants to draw the (incorrect) conclusion that the content on this 'carousel' was randomized, and there was no rhyme or reason why certain content appeared next to one another. 

During the card sort, we learned that when given free reign to organize this site's content however they wanted, participants divided the content into the What and the Why. The What contained information about new tools and innovation by USPS, and explanations of current services. The Why held content which dealt with helping campaign managers come up with winning strategies, and important research they could use to justify and formulate these strategies.

Our Solution-
It was clear from our data that the flat, tag-based Information architecture and navigation was not conducive to the way users wanted to explore this site. Instead, a hierarchical navigation with main categories and subcategories would much better meet the needs of these candidates and campaign managers using the site. While we did not suggest any actual titles for these categories and subcategories, including sections for news & innovations, explanations, strategies, and research & demographics would most closely match user expectations.

Consistency & Clarity

Participants often noticed inconsistencies in the site which negatively impacted their experience and caused difficulties.

When navigation the 'carousel', there was an 'on hover' interaction where the color and text of content changed. This caused participants to forget what exactly they were about to click on, and required them to mouse over something else (to make the original wording reappear) in order to remind themselves what content they wanted to click.

Our Solution-
Make this hover state only affect the background color, and not the actual text shown on the card. This would still help users visualize what was selected, but still allow them to see what content they were about to click on.

Search

We also tested how users reacted to the search function on the site. We witnessed many participants experience difficulty getting to where they wanted to go from the search results page, most of this difficulty resulting from a lack of visual hierarchy on this page. Issues in alignment and spacing caused participants to have trouble correlating the clickable titles with the content they contained, and where this content was listed on the page. This also created an increased and unneccesary cognitive load on users.

Our Solution-
Redesign the search results page, left-aligning the results, grouping related content closer together and allowing for more whitespace between results