although this would all be clear with better text and a different way of talking to the user.

Suggested language for opening contact with user:

Your email address is your unique username for the Friends, Family & Neighbors program. We won’t give it to anyone for any purpose, not even the campaign. We will use it to communicate with you about using Friends, Family & Neighbors.

Will this tool be available for other campaigns? I see it as potentially quite powerful in a district like mine, CA-04, that is geographically huge and physically hard-to-cover. Plus, the independents and Democrats traditionally fly under the radar here.

1. Sign up process

This is not secure. Either a password and registration, or ‘reenter your password’

Decide on the level of security and stick to it. This is two levels, not one. If I sign up without
a password anyone can put words in my mouth later.

If you’re going to use my name and address you need a round-trip validation process to make sure it’s
really me. Something like the “we’ll send you an email with a confirmation code” that many sites
use.

2. … and it doesn’t work anyway. Retyping password does nothing. Fix this, or fix the text.

3. Getting Started (name, address etc)

Should be a form, not a field by field dialog. This is very primitive coding.

4. ‘Find a Friend’

This is displayed immediately after registration. Why???? At this point I want some interaction/display
from the system. I want it to give me something, not just decide that it knows what I want to do
(find a friend) and then force me to do it.

‘Finding a friend’ is a search function that has *nothing* to do with why I (as the
stand-in-for-the-normal-user) has come to this site.

If I want to ‘find a friend’ I look in my phone book. On the other hand, if I want to know if they’re
part of the campaign I’ll either already know or I’ll ask them myself.

5. Then I get a list of names and addresses which kind of match my search criteria, but none of whom are
the person I entered.

At this point, those other people have no privacy and – even though I don’t know them – I know their
names and addresses. Writing a bot to harvest identities out of this will be a doddle.

6. Then ‘Send a Postcard’

At this point I’m asked to send a postcard to someone who has already registered.

What is the point? The other person has already declared their support. Are we supposed to send
self-congratjulatory messages to the already converted?

7. Again, the last 3 steps are very primitive design. I’m given a dialog with no intimation of
it’s purpose, and I’m being spoon fed it field by field.

8. And I’m being led through a script. This is system design at it’s worst. This is worse than the
old green-screen days (pre Mac).

C’mon you guys run web sites, you know how to build them. Rule #1: Let the user drive.

9. Question: what do I do if I don’t want to find a friend? I can’t get to the main site unless
I figure out that clicking on the main logo will get me there.

In summary, this seems not to have been conceived well. It’s difficult to figure out what it’s trying
to do. Find a friend? But only if they’re already a supporter? Send them a postcard? But only
if they’re already signed up?

Maybe a blog format, with forums (and more collaborative, networky type stuff where people don’t
necessarily have to communicate via the server) might be better.

and a clarification: this tool has existed for quite some time – it’s not “newly launched.” the first version, however, was incredibly poorly put together, and the one you see now is the result of efforts to redesign it. it works, it’s being used, and despite the obvious tweaks still needed, satisfies the key purposes required of it.

none, what if there simply aren’t enough bodies to go around to beat on the doors? Is something better than nothing in contacting voters?

I’m not talking about individual campaigns, but an aggregated coordinated campaign approach post-primary. There are only so many activists to go around. I figure in my state of 10 million residents, we can’t count on an average of more than 25 activists per county (83 counties) to do the GOTV leg work.

Suppose there are no problems and the thing works perfectly. The result? Junk mail postcards, ineffectual given the amount of junk mail everyone already gets. It’s just spam on paper.

Dean’s handwritten letters really made an impact. I wrote several myself. Anything that comes out of a computer is nowhere near as effective.

This program is well intended but is way too late in the game and doesn’t do the right stuff. GOTV needs people physically pounding the pavement, not tapping a keyboard. IT can help coordinate that but I don’t have a sense that this is being done.

Lamont’s campaign is messing up in several other ways too. I’m not even sure he really wants to win. Certainly he’s approaching this like a newbie–we can’t hold that against him too much because he IS one. But he should have studied the Dean campaign very closely, repeated the successes and avoided the errors. And the successes with voters all involved human to human contact (meetups, door to door canvassing, handwritten letters) unmediated by computers. The IT was all behind the scenes. Of course people already involved used the net extensively for communication, but for someone uninvolved, anything that comes out of a machine is spam.