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Red Vs Blue – round 3

This post is part of a series – read all the Red Vs Blue articles here

After having a look at how the Labour Vs the Conservative party site compare with their usage of front pages and supporter statements to engage their audience, this round explores how they present their policies. They are, after all, the most important thing a party can do to gain support from the voting public and how they show thier vision for our futures. So how do the two sites compare?

First up – How do we get to these pages?

Labour
There are two ways to get to the Labour policy page. By a subnavigation item on the top of the site (Labour in government / Labour’s policies). Or by direct hotlinks in the sites footer navigation which link straight to individual policy information pages.

Both methods place the links in logical places so are easy to find. Neither really play up this content though. More emphasis is placed on news and their webcameron spoof content – which also makes some sense, policy information is long and hard to make particularly interesting and also does not update as often as the other content items. However ‘Read our policies’ could have been one of the icons on the right hand menu as they are strong call to actions and I think it deserved something more prominent than the current treatment. The footer text is probably there as much for SEO optimisation as much as user accessibility as the footer is very far down the screen on many pages. Navigation items there are not prominent in the user experience and may be missed.

Conservative
The conservative party are trying to creative awareness of their policies to compete with the current government in power – so as expected they give the policy page a top level navigation item rather than a sub one. They also have a call to action box more prominently on the page. It is near the footer, but the Conservative page is no where near as long as the labour equivalent due to it’s compartmental design, so this aspect is a lot more visible to the user.

What do we see when we click them?

Labour
For labour you can link straight to a policy directly, which speeds up finding information for those users and is a point in Labours favour. If they click the navigation links at the top of the page however they go via a policy intro page. The page looks like this:

It has a rather long introduction and then a list of links to individual policy pages below. Clicking an individual policy takes you to it’s specific page. Which all look like this:

It isn’t particularly visually appealing. I don’t really have much more to say about it than that to be honest. It does present the information clearly by using bullet pointed lists of key information. But it doesn’t give you the option to view any more detailed information online or via a PDF download. You cant for example go to a forum discussing the issues or email your local MP to ask them about it. There isn’t any interactivity. it is just a brief snippet of information. To get to another policy you can either re-navigate to the main page via the top navigation panel, via a text link below the body of copy, or directly via one of the aforementioned footer hotlinks. There seem to be a lot of links here… but the most useful ones in this context are hidden away in the footer, which starts far below the content on some pages end, meaning if you don’t know it is there you are likely to miss it and if you do know, you have to scroll down to get to it. It seems a little counter intuitive.

Conservative
And speaking of counter-intuitive… The Conservative page looks like this:

First impressions? It looks beautiful – a flash widget loads in those quasi-3D panels which elegantly animate into a circle with an instruction to use the arrow keys to navigate. So I did. The animations scrolls through the options quick smoothly. The reflections are very jagged and pixely but it does load and respond quite quickly. So overall this looks like a lovely page. Hotlinks in text down the left hand side to everything you could need and a lovely animation to play with. The problem comes when you try to use the animation for anything other than rotating the objects. Some are clickable, but respond slowly, others aren’t clickable but you cant tell which is which by just looking. This had me clicking objects left right and centre with mixed results. Also, (and getting back to my counter-intuitive comment earlier) if you click the square next to the one in focus nothing happens. It doesn’t rotate to the front or open. You have to use the arrows until it is in focus to try to click it. Which, as explained, may or may not do anything… The clickable objects respond to a click by moving towards the camera so you can read them clearly – which I could anyway without the zoom. Some have a small clickable area for more information on them. Some of these links change the content on the square with a link to read the full policy – others just go straight to the policy. Both times this means you end up navigating away from the page and if you go back the flash needs to reload. Which doesn’t take long, but is annoying on slower connections if you only accidentally clicked the policy link.

I thought this widget looked lovely and had a lot of potential but was just too annoying to use. For example. I have a similar navigation on my site implemented in PHP and JS, it had options to click arrows, use the scroll wheel to spin the items and if you click one further round the list it immediately brings it to focus… and that was from open source code freely available on the net which I adapted. Surely with all the money clearly spent on the Conservative site they can do some usability testing and add some more functionality to what could be a very useful flash navigation item. At least I would pull the policy content in under the flash item so there is no need to reload it each time, and also so it could bring some colour to the internal pages which, as with the labour ones, have no imagery to speak of. They do have clearer navigation and relevant downloadable documents to hand for each policy however.

Overall I think both sites could do with some work in this area. The content seems to be clear and concise on both. The labour one really needs some attention paid to the navigation (even a back to list of policies link at the end of the content for a policy would be nice) and links to extra information. The conservative one is clearly trying to do for it’s policies what it did on the supporter page – but has failed, making something slightly counter-intuitive and even annoying to use. Which is a shame – as with a few tweaks it would have blown the Labour pages out the water. The conservative site, if you ignore the flash aspect which, since it isn’t really useful comes across as a very slick but failed gimmick, is very easy to use and has plenty of information and links to extra content. Again no forums to discuss issues or direct links to ask local party members questions, but the core information and supporting PDF downloads are easy to find and read which puts this above the equivalent Labour offering on their site.

Round 3 goes to the Conservative site – dispute the horrible niggles with the flash animation.

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This post is part of a series – read all the Red Vs Blue articles here