Add party & house filters to the policy page, so I can quickly review policy agreement by party or house of parliament #1092

brtrx · 2016-03-21T07:06:38Z

Rationale

Currently, users must click twice from this page in order to determine which party a particular member belongs to, making it impossible to use this page to quickly understand party policy positions or relative agreement within a party.

The mockup below attempts to repair this by allowing users to quickly filter by party.

At the same time, often critical debates happen in one house or another (e.g. the recent SenateSleepover), and so positions across House or Senate are more important.

Notes

this includes features from Add names to the list of people on the policy page, so I don't need to recognize their faces to identify then #1090 (Add names...) and When I'm looking at a policy I'm interested in, help me see how my MP voted on it when I don't know their name or face #1091 (live text filter), but these aren't dependencies
after filtering, empty groupings should be hidden

brtrx · 2016-03-21T07:08:52Z

Mind the typo in the filter options on the right in the mockup above.
Obviously, it should read "House of Representatives" not "House of Representative"

brtrx · 2016-03-21T08:14:05Z

Once we add filters, we'll need an empty state.
Here's a mockup.

Clicking "refresh the page" should do just that, and in doing so, clear filters (i.e. filters shouldn't be stateful).

equivalentideas · 2016-03-21T22:05:40Z

Thanks @brtrx .

Currently, users must click twice from this page in order to determine which party a particular member belongs to, making it impossible to use this page to quickly understand party policy positions or relative agreement within a party.

Could you explain the user need for this feature?

brtrx · 2016-03-22T06:32:54Z

Hey Luke,

Here are some questions I might have in mind when arriving on this page, which currently require a lot of effort to answer.

"Are the Greens for or against this policy?"
"Did the Greens vote against this in the Senate?"
"Are there any rebels within the ALP on this issue?"
"What was the name of that opposition Senator who voted with the govt on this policy?"
"How did the minor parties / independents vote?"

All of these could be quickly answered without leaving this page, by providing party and house filters.

Does that explain the user need better?

equivalentideas · 2016-03-22T06:47:17Z

Does that explain the user need better?

Hmmm. Those are all potentially interesting questions, but I'm not sure if knowing the answers will be useful to most people.

We have a fairly strong belief that has driven the design of the site that the people are much more important that the parties. This is because it's much easier for someone to impact what their elected representative does in parliament than unelected party organisations. You also elect a person, not a party.

One of our design principles is:

Focus on enabling actions that citizens want to take and access to the knowledge that they are looking for. Reduce the cost of them taking action. The action is the important bit. Citizens don't need to understand the bureaucracy in order to use and access government.

So I guess the real question is “What's the action that this information would help people take?”

brtrx · 2016-03-22T07:35:24Z

That's fair enough. And thanks for pointing me to those design docs. Great design principles, BTW!

I guess I have a couple of ways of responding.
Obviously, I'm new, so if I'm contradicting any user research you guys let me know. I'd love to read it.
Still, a few of the questions I've mentioned above are in your design docs here https://github.com/openaustralia/publicwhip/blob/master/design_docs/user-questions.md#policy including "How does the parliament vote overall?" (why could be interpreted as e.g. is the senate hostile) and "How do the parties vote on this policy?"

OK, so if that's information that people might want, one of the other principles is people are smart and busy, so we need to offer them a way to get that info quickly.

But you also asked what actions people can take, and how this enhances a connection to members of parliament.

And sure, this feature mighn't do anything to modify your relationship to your own member or Senator directly, apart from providing political context.

But it can do a few other important things, especially if you are genuinely concerned about the policy in question

it can help you identify whether your MPs party needs you to speak up on this issue, and whether you should be writing to Senators or other House MPs in doing so (e.g. by quickly seeing that Senate is hostile)
if your own MP is against the policy, it can tell you whether they voted with their party or against, I.e. whether you need to change your MPs mind, or their party's, on this issue
it can help you discover other MPs or parties that think like you, which may make you change (or threaten to change) your vote to that party - especially pertinent for Senate voting, I think.
if you do need to change your party's mind, it can help you identify other party members who do rebel on the issue, I.e. potential allies in changing the party line.

What do you think?

equivalentideas · 2016-03-23T00:01:30Z

@brtrx Thanks heaps for this detailed thinking but it’s going to require some more serious thinking, research and discussion on our part next time we're working on this project as a team.

I also think those user questions are a bit outdated from our thinking at this point :( I realise our thinking about the UX for They Vote For You isn't well documented, which is a bug we should fix. It makes it hard to act on contribution like this, which are still really useful in documenting a line of thinking—just hard to pick up for us at the moment.

mackaymackay · 2019-10-13T09:20:38Z

Related to this issue, we've had a Facebook comment that adding a background colour to our head shots would be helpful since it would give users a visual indication of how party members are voting.

For example, we could add a red border for Labor members, blue for Coalition members and green for Green members.

mackaymackay · 2020-02-21T06:17:46Z

Another related suggestion via Facebook today: "How about colour coding the background or tagging photos with Party affiliation?"

What do you think is the likelihood that we could implement something like this @jamezpolley ?

katska · 2020-02-25T00:07:09Z

The thinking was that party colours props up the idea that people have to vote with their parties, rather than representing their constituents views. I think its worth re-examining the idea! Does it help or hinder to not display party colours?

mackaymackay · 2020-02-28T00:22:31Z

I think it would help to display party colours. While philosophically I agree with placing the emphasis on a representative as belonging to the electorate first and the party second, the reality of our political system usually means that the opposite is the case. Since we want TVFY to be as helpful as possible, and considering that this suggestion has been made several times, I think it's time to go for it, if we can; unless someone has firm objections.

stale · 2021-10-13T02:04:07Z