Red Vs Blue – round 2
This post is part of a series – read all the Red Vs Blue articles here
This post examines the support pages of the sites and how the parties leverage the support of the general public and engage them.
First off – how do we get to these sections on the websites from the front page?
The labour site has a tab within the sub-navigation and also a icon based button at the bottom of the site. Photos of regular people on the front of the site – but they don’t have associated quotes direct from those people – leaving it feeling a little prescriptive. On the other hand the conservative site has a top level navigation button at the top plus a dedicated section of photos of their supporters with an invitation to join them and a quote.
Clicking the conservative call to actions take the user to the ‘conservative wall’ where a flash animation loads in a large (but pretty quick to load) bank of these little thumbnail photos:
In the middle the photo you click plays a video of that person explaining why they are conservative. You can watch or close the person speaking or just click another to swap to another testimonial. It’s all pretty quick and easy to use and there are a variety of people represented.
On the left is an area to put in a name or post code which take you to an area showing your local representatives and association with contact details.
You can join the party on various email lists, social networks and so on – but due to the nature of the delivery you can’t submit your own comments and testimonials as easily, these are professionally shot videos. You can join and create a log-in where you can upload photos and videos but the content I saw did not look purely user generated. However I am not sure how new the wall is – perhaps the younger generation will upload clips, but this does alienate slightly the older more standard conservative supporter.
However, apart from that omittance, it all makes for a really interesting interactive experience, choosing and watching the videos in such a intuitive and exploratory way does make you feel part of the experience and encourages you to click more photos – I admit I clicked quite a few, even if I didn’t listen to them all the way through – my time spend on this page was longer than I would have imagined.
The labour site is the diametric opposite of the conservative site. Whereas you can literally hear the dull thud as the wads of money are thrown at the conservative site experience labour seem to have spent, well, nothing more than spare change. The support ‘why I’m Labour’ page is topped with a rather dull form. If you only looked quickly (or have a lower resolution screen than mine) you might think this was the only content and navigate away immediately. Scroll down however, and there are personal testimonials from the general public.
Scroll down some more to see more testimonials:
Then some more, and some more…
In fact the page height was far too high for such repetitive text content. There is no categorisation, search ability or real interaction, you just scroll down and read in a very linear fashion. I must say, I hardly read any of the content. The testimonials light up grey when you hover over them, but you cant click them which seemed a peculiar decision, and hardly counts as interactive.
There are some good points in using text based testimonials, even though the implementation is awful in this example. Text based content is search and index-able by google and other search engines. It is more accessible to disabled users using screen readers or hard of hearing. You can submit your own testimonials and engage by seeing your own comments on the site. So potentially, with far better design, labour could have won this challenge purely based on the usability angle. However, the conservative approach could be made more accessible. Subtitles could have been added to the videos (had they been slightly larger) and a html version with text transcripts of the testimonials could have been supplied for less able users.
So, because much more work would be needed to make the Labour page at all engaging than to make the Conservative one accessible; there is really no contest here. The Conservative page is original, engaging, interactive, fast to load and actually quite fun for what it is.
links:
The Conservative page in action
The Labour page in action
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This post is part of a series – read all the Red Vs Blue articles here
