Clutter We Can Believe In

I visited Barack Obama’s website yesterday looking to find his “Blueprint for Change” to convince an undecided voter (yes, they really do exist!) to vote for him. I guess I haven’t been on his site much in the last few months, though, because the clean, crisp design I remember seems to have been replaced by a Christmas tree that’s staggering from the weight of too many departmental ornaments. Not only has the homepage height been slowly increasing, with inclusion of more widgets along the righthand side, but top of the homepage has been crowded with so many calls to action, some are literally on top of each other.

Here’s a screenshot of his homepage above the fold a few months back (via nowitis):

And here’s a screenshot of the same from today:

Notice the difference? Analysis of how the space is used, and lessons for your nonprofit, below the fold…

Before we cut the page up and start looking at calls to action and space utilization, let’s look at the purpose of the site. There are two primary target audiences for barackobama.com: activists/small donors and undecided voters. There are also a number of secondary audiences, including the media, big donors, wavering Democratic and Republican voters, and bloggers, but for now, let’s concentrate just on our two primary audiences. These goals haven’t really changed much for the two versions of the site – the universe of undecided voters shifted from Dem primary voters to general election voters, and the activist pool had to expand to include a call for former activists for other candidates, but they’re still largely similar.

The goal for the activists/small donors is to get them to take actions that will help the campaign, including donating and volunteering, as well as to keep them fired up for future asks to take these actions. All four items in the central “big story” area apply to these users, along with the “vote for change” plug, the “get involved” button, the MyBO bar at the top, and of course the big red donate button.

The goal for undecided voters, of course, is to convince them to vote Obama. For this group, two of the “big story” items apply (the “Honor” ad and the plug for hurricane victims), as well as the state homepages and the tagline near the top that says what the campaign is all about.

One item that straddles the two categories is the “En Espanol” button near the top right – ultimately, I’d say that it currently caters more to undecideds, given that most of the content on the page focuses on persuasion rather than action, but note that there is a Spanish “donate” button as well.

Scrolling down there’s a bevy of other actions as well:

We can see that there are more activist-themed widgets on the bottom than those oriented for undecided voters, but did you notice how many of them repeat content at the top of the page?

This is where I see a real lesson for non-profits. The overcrowded nature of the homepage didn’t crop up overnight. It probably appeared bit by bit as various departments saw their items creeping down the page, and that they were no longer hitting their goals. So they leaned on the web team to give them a plug near the top of the page as well – the states, MyBo, action center, and voter registration all moved their way up in between the two screenshots (and Biden moved in, but I think we can call that unrelated).

The result of this is the tragedy of the commons: everyone said, “Well, it’s just one tiny button – how much harm can it do?” until the page became so filled with calls to action that it’s difficult for users to understand what to do. Non-profit web teams need to have the executive backing to be able to look at the big picture and say “no” to some initiatives that clamor for top billing on your website, otherwise this kind of clutter sets in, and is impossible to remove without a redesign.

I don’t doubt that many on the Obama web team would like to remove some of these items from the homepage. But the moment they remove the store, for example, they can set a very short timer until the finance director bursts into the campaign manager’s office to show stats on how merch sales have plummeted since the store disappeared. Meanwhile, the six other departments may see incremental gain from removing competition for eyeballs, but not enough so that they’ll really individually fight to keep the store from reappearing, at which point everything starts over just like it was, except that now the store has been established as unmoveable – the same would happen for any item that was cut or moved below the fold. And when the next redesign cycle comes along, all the department heads will say “The homepage is too crowded – make it less busy,” leaving unsaid, “But don’t you dare touch my stuff!”