Political Web 2.0: If I’m President

Tossing its hat into the ring of political web 2.0 applications and social networks, If I'm President (in alpha mode) wants you to share your political views. As part of my ongoing series on Politics and Web 2.0, I decided to check it out. Earlier in the series I look at sites like 20DC, VocalNation, ElectionTV, Essembly, Maplight and the individual candidate social sites. How did If I'm President compare?

It lost a few points right away for visual presence. Part of any good Web 2.0 presence is being streamlined and having a simple, sleek interface. If I'm President seems boxy and cluttered, with unappealing blue and brown as the primary colors. Perhaps design shouldn't matter so much in a political web application, but it does. If a site isn't easy on the eyes and quick to navigate these days, I find myself not wanting to try it out, much less stick around and use it.

Once you've signed up you are taken to an unattractive and strange animation that “walks you through your profile”. I'm of the opinion that this shouldn't be necessary. If the site is designed well finding your way around should be natural, not difficult. Difficult to use sites are falling by the wayside as the web, and it's users, become more advanced. Regardless, the animation points out different aspects of your profile in a manner similar to a power point slide show, complete with self-comparisons to aspects of FaceBook.

The site adds to its own clutter by using such crowded navigation tools as tag clouds and squared off tabs. By following the tags in the tag clouds you are taken to user added links to political news stories. These stories have places where you can interact with them by replying, adding links, contributing sources, adding video and more. That's a nice feature, and it would make me happier if it wasn't buried under so much rubble. Each article and the interaction on If I'm President can also be placed on your blog or web site with a widget, provided by the site under each linked article.

If you don't want to navigate the cluttered tag clouds sorted into Last 24 Hours, Last Week and Last Month, you can use the row of tabs at the top of the screen. These allow to navigate to News, Blogs, Discussion, Policies, the '08 Election and your own profile. The News tab takes you to the same links you find in the tag clouds, just sorted in a more linear fashion. Blogs takes you to users' political blog links within the site. I was hoping the site would redeem itself by allowing the same level of interaction on the blog posts as it does on the news links (adding sources, feeds and videos as well as comments), but it does not. It restricts you to commenting.

Discussions seem to be in a pseudo forum format. the author can post the interactive features like polls and videos that go along with their topic. User are also allowed to post polls, videos and links to support their arguments in the discussion. This is an even nicer feature when paired with discussions as well as the news stories. I don't know why the powers that be on If I'm President haven't made it a bigger selling point. If they did it might distract from the clunky layout and blue/brown color scheme.

The Policies tab doesn't seem to be getting much use yet, which makes it hard to evaluate. It seems to be a place where you can act as your own policy wonk, outlining your master plan for solving a problem, like Iraq. People can then use a sliding scale (a literal sliding scale) to rank how they think your plan would work. This also comes with a widget code you can place on your blog or web site, similar to other areas if If I'm President.

the '08 Election tab has a tracker for each major candidate. Next to their photo you can see the number of articles about them, with a link to the articles. You can also see how many “friends' they have, with links to the people who have added them as a friend. then you can click on whether or not the candidate is your “pick” to win, and the number of people who have picked them shows next to their head shot.

Overall, I think the site has some nice concepts and cool features. Unfortunately I still probably won't go back unless the beta version is much improved, because these features are hidden so deeply beneath a poor design with a lot of clutter. The clutter makes navigation annoying at best, and makes it easy to overlook the things that could make the site neat. They should reevaluate the overall ease of use and visual navigation of the site, and play up some of the interactive features more to really stand out in a crowded field.

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