“I wouldn’t chuck this out!” –Applying Infographic Design and Information Shortcuts to Local Election Candidate Booklets

Here is the full text of my dissertation/research on applying infographic design and information shortcuts to local election candidate booklets. You can download it over at scribd.

View this document on Scribd

Project Results -What voters thought was good and bad.

With the project research complete, it is now a good time to sum up what the research was looking at and in particular what the results found. Our focus groups found that when voters know little to nothing about a candidate, the current standard voter information is not at all “useful”.

Standard Voter Information layout used in Candidate Information Booklets and Pamphlets

Bad VOFO or Blurbs, statements and block text are considered hard to read and comprehend. Voters will instead just use the photo and the names of candidates to “shortcut” or infer political information .i.e She “looks” like a good leader, he has a strong “sounding” name. Instead, voters need information that is provided not only in terms of  adequate quantity, but also high quality and accessible information.

Example of Infographic VOFO Layout

Good VOFO or Infographic voter information is able to provide this as it increases the quality (more information) whilst also increasing the quality (structure, organisation, focus) and boosting accessibility (colourful, interesting, easy to understand, quick to use).

But one example- Local Voter Information Visualized!

This is a prototype of the voter information booklet we redesigned for use in our focus groups. Trying to improve the quantity, quality and accessibility of voter information! Take a peep what do your think!?

DISCLAIMER: ALL INFORMATION IS FICTIONAL AND BASED ONLY IN PART ON ACTUAL FACT FOR SAMPLING PURPOSES ONLY.

Further breakdown and explanation to come

Focus Group Time

My focus group set up. 8/9 2012

So after six months of research and pulling together a few scraps of international best practice on what makes good VOFO, it was time to try and test out if what I had learnt worked. I ran two focus groups of students who were new to voting(the time when they are most vulnerable to form non voting habits) and essentially asked them if compared to “stament based profile information” whether they found this visualized infographic information more useful and accessible.

Reflecting on a recent presentation.

This prezi I’ve put above was used on Friday the 27th of July during a presentation of where I am “so far” with my dissertation for Pols 490.

The presentation was to be 15 minutes long and infront of my fellow classmates and a selection of lecturers from the University of Otago’s department of Politics.

While my preparation and development of content before hand was slightly hectic and more rushed then I would have liked, the class seemed to forgive me and I was quite pleased with the response if not slightly embarrassed with myself for not being more organized.

Rather than focus on a specific chapter of the research, like many others did, I really wanted to give an overall yet clear idea of what I was trying to do. This meant however that I was forced to speak at a mile a minute in order to cover even the broad ideas involved with my research. But on the whole it turned out ok and was really good in terms of a “consolidation exercise”.

Tacking Aim at the Candidate Information Booklets

In order to limit the frame for this research, I decided to take aim at a particular part of Voter Information that for me exemplifies what bad VOFO looks like-namely the Candidate Information Booklet used in local elections. You can flick throughthe Dunedin 2010 candidate profiles in the Issuu above or visit the Web version here.

These information booklets(or pamphlets) are always very similar -they consist of the candidates name, a recent black and white photograph, the name of a ticket or declaration of “independence”.

The Smart Spider- “Where content and visualization come together”

Design Niko Elsen, Concept Michael Herrmann.

An excellent example of visualisation in Political opinion mapping is the Sotomo Research Project (in German) lead by Michael Hermann  from Zurich University. They were asked by the European Union to create a way for voters in European Parliamentary elections to more easily understand the where both political parties and individual candidates stood on the broad political topics. Hermann’s “SmartSpider” has gathered a significant amount of interest as “the next best thing” in Visualizing Politics and spectrums. 

The Political Compass

One important and growing theme in examples of good Vofo from around the world is the idea of getting voters and politicians alike to easily understand where each stands in a broad political spectrum.

Traditionally this is most easily explained as the Left-Right political continuum, as detailed by David MaCandless in this info-graphic. But often it is seen as having multiple stages as this spectrum shows.

Political Scientists often argue however that this over simplifies politics and doesn’t capture the broad ranges of issues, let alone political party positions that are represented.