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Looking good on the web: evaluating the visual impact of political websites

Published: 05 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We present a study designed to measure the perceptions of the visual design for political websites. We use as our sample population approximately 400 different websites for United States Congressional office-holders. In the analysis and presentation of our results we use the United States map divided into congressional districts, and then encode the study participants' perceptions of the visual design of the websites according to a color scale that maps to the perceived favorability of the site. Our motivation for the visualization is, of course, the well known red-blue map that depicts election results according to support for a particular political party. Further, we intend to look at the competitiveness of the districts where congressional elected officials reside, the noticeable features on their websites (for example, if a blog or visible contact information exists), as well as the results in relation to demographic information about the individual (political party, gender, age, etc). Beyond developing an understanding of the political landscape, our study aims to suggest a set of heuristics that tend to lead to more favorably perceived website designs.

References

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Ballew, C., Toforov, A. (2007) Predicting Political Elections from Rapid and Unreflective Face Judgments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2007).
[2]
Emanuel, R. (2006) DCCC Red to Blue Program. http://www.dccc.org/news/Red_to_Blue/index.html
[3]
Fox, J., Koloen, G., Sahin, V. (2007) No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign. http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/4159.html
[4]
Gastner, M., Shalizi, C., Newman, M. Maps and Cartograms of the 2004 Presidential Election Results. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
[5]
Harrison McKnight, D., Choudhury, V., Kacmar, C. (2002) The Impact of Initial Consumer Trust on Intentions to Interact with a Website: A Trust Building Model. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 2002.
[6]
Horrigan, J. B. (2004) How Americans get in touch with government. Pew Internet & American Life Project.
[7]
Many Eyes. IBM Collaborative UX Group. http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home
[8]
Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). HeuristicEvaluation of User Interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI'90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249--256.
[9]
Ostrowski, J. Ron Paul Revolution Halftime Report. http://tinyurl.com/2h8lm4
[10]
Westling, M. (2007) Expanding the Public Sphere: The Impact of Facebook on Political Communication. http://www.thenewvernacular.com/projects/facebook_and_political_communication.pdf

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  1. Looking good on the web: evaluating the visual impact of political websites

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '08: CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2008
    2035 pages
    ISBN:9781605580128
    DOI:10.1145/1358628
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 05 April 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. democracy
    2. design heuristics
    3. e-government
    4. information visualization
    5. political websites

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