So, it’s a nice fifteen minutes of fame when we get picked up by the popular press, in this case, Fast Company magazine:

Cliff Kuang did a nice job describing the research I described in my $300 Million Button article from a few weeks ago:

UIE studied people actually using the site, and it turns out that the prospect of registering was enough to turn some users away; meanwhile, even return users had problems logging in because they didn’t remember the email address or password they signed up with. (45% of users apparently had multiple registrations—a few had up to 10.) Granted, these represented a small portion of users. But for a retailer with $25 billion, even small portions signify huge lost profits.

So UIE redesigned the site, replacing the “register” button with “continue.” They also added a message, saying that registering wasn’t required to checkout, but was optional and might be helpful if you returned.

Sales went up 45%—$15 million in the first month, and $300 million in the first year.

Read Cliff’s write up on FastCompany.com.

I haven’t had a chance to watch voters use either site, so I chose four scenarios that I thought would be common tasks for a voter visiting each site. I rated each site on a scale of one (very frustrating) to five (easy and delightful) scale. (Because I was interested in the design of the site, I didn’t take any points off about the candidate’s positions or message.)

Current News task: What has the candidate said or done about the debates and dealing with the economy in the last 24 hours?

For this task, I looked for any details about what I’ve been hearing in the news. Will the candidate show up for the debates? What is the candidate proposing to solve the economic strife we’re dealing with?

BarackObama.com: 4
There’s an article on the home page that leads to the information. It has a ton of information on both issues in a 16 minute video, but it’s not transcribed, so you have to watch the entire thing.

JohnMcCain.com: 5
There’s an article on the home page that leads to his statements. The site provides a detailed transcript of his statement (which is a good thing, because the audio for the statement is not very coherent).

Specific Issue task: What is the candidate’s position on stem cell research?

For this task, I tried to locate what each candidate feels about stem cell research.

BarackObama.com: 2
The categories in the Issues menu make no mention of this issue. Not found in Ethics, Family, Technology. There is no search function on the site. The Issues page doesn’t mention it. External search found it under Women’s issues.

JohnMcCain.com: 3
The categories in the Issues menu make no mention of this issue. I found it in theHuman Dignity and The Sanctity of Life category. (Sometimes listed as “Values”.) The Search function returns a large number of links, 2 of the first three have no mention of stem cell research. You have to go the seventh result to get to the Human Dignity page (labeled “Values”), but the blurb talks about McCain’s POW experience.

General Issue Task: What differentiates the candidate from his opponent?

I tried to see if there’s any easy way to tell what makes this candidate different. Guess what? There isn’t.

BarackObama.com: 2
They have a 33-page report available for download. The report’s pages don’t print on standard printer without chopping of edge text. Elements of the report are dispersed around the web site, but there’s no summary of positions without bouncing through pages.

JohnMcCain.com: 3
I couldn’t find any summary of entire position. Multiple levels of detail (good!) spread across many pages (not good!) with no way to see the entire story.

Make Donation Task: How do I contribute to the campaign?

BarackObama.com: 4
Easy to find the donation page. URL is for the same site. Instructions at the bottom on how to mail in a check (instead of paying by mail). Error messages tell you where problems are. First time small donors still need to put in employer info (not clear). Very little small print. Page design is simple.

JohnMcCain.com: 3
Easy to find the donation page, but it opens in a different window and the URL is for site not associated with the campaign (will people be concerned about phishing?). No instructions for mailing in a donation. Error messages don’t say where entry issues are. It’s clear you always need to put in employer info. Tons of small print. Page design is more convoluted and feels like an eBay order form.

Winner: JohnMcCain.com

If you want to average the scores, BarackObama.com came in with a solid 3. JohnMcCain came in with a 3.5. Both sites have a ways to go to get perfect 5s, or even a solid 4.

The big problem, I think, is the sites don’t do great at letting the meat of what the candidate stands for come to the surface. If someone wants to do some solid research on what these guys are really about, it’s hard to get that from either site.

They may be running for President, but content is king!

The article, The MySpace Problem, takes a good look at the question of why so many designers perceive MySpace pages to be “ugly” and, yet, the site is so successful. This has created quite a stir in the design community, putting the value of design into question.

Check out the article, which has scored more than 1,000 on Digg.

Congrats, Josh!

Design for the Scent of Information

Jared Spool is CEO and co-founder of User Interface Engineering (UIE), a think tank. They advise clients how to design their browser-based systems for the best information retrieval experience possible. This includes web sites, but also knowledge management systems –nowadays better known as enterprise content management systems.

Let’s take a closer look. Consider the following text:

Web 2.0 Design: Bootstrapping the Social Web
By Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter

Humans can instantly recognize this as a title and authors of a work, in this case a column here at Digital Web Magazine. We know this because of past experience. We’ve seen similar things before. It is apparent that the first line is a title and the second line is two authors. Given this information, humans are able to act on it in a meaningful way. For instance, you could answer someone if they asked you “Who wrote that?”

Machines, with their rigid information processing capabilities, need everything spelled out for them. To be able to do something useful with this title and byline, a machine would need to be able to parse it correctly. It would need to know that the number (2.0) in the first line is part of the title and shouldn’t be interpreted as a numeric value, that the spaces around it separate words from each other, and that the second line is made up of two names and not one. In other words, a machine would need to be able to do algorithmically what we humans do almost without thinking.

This would work amazingly well, and is very possible even today, except that the syntax of titles and bylines changes from person to person and from usage to usage. What if I changed my first name to just be the initial “J”? Or misspelled it? Humans would still understand the endless permutations. Machines, though, unless programmed for every single possible permutation, cannot reliably make the same decisions that we can. The human ability to adapt and interpret is special.

“I would say going forward that AJAX is going to have a ton of focus and support behind it,” says Joshua Porter, research consultant and director of Web development for research firm User Interface Engineering. “Because it is built on open standards, it is going to be the next plateau that we reach on the Web, like with HTML.”

Go figure…

(Maybe that’s why they haven’t accepted any of my submissions for the conference in years.)