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His speech worked and is working

By Philosophistry.com - Mar 20th, 2008 at 4:28 am EDT

For the couple hours after watching Obama's speech, I became engrossed in web surfing. I tried to find everybody's take on it. I read TheRoot, and Slate, and FoxNews. And I re-watched the speech. I was mostly interested in how this whole thing was going to play out politically. Watching politics has largely been a game to me.

But after reading so many links, I started to get dissatisfied. I had a nagging feeling that I shouldn't be engaging in Obama's speech on a meta level. Somehow I felt I needed to do more.

So a few hours later, I went to the library and picked up a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Invisible Man. This would be the first time I've ever seriously engaged any black literature. And I'm 25. I graduated from High School and a four-year University, and while I may have been exposed to some documentaries about the mistreatment of blacks (ironically only in my 8th grade class with a black teacher), never I have I engaged the literary consciousness of the black experience.

And this is not out of any willful bias on my part. I just don't read much, and usually I only do so based on a specific recommendation from others. It's just nobody had mentioned it.

Obama's speech made it really clear to me that I didn't know what I didn't know. And I'm excited by that. I'm excited that he has in a way become a teacher to me. The fact that I made an effort to investigate a blind spot of knowledge on race gives me hope that other people are going to do the same. His speech worked and is working.

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No Longer Frustrated, But Still Unhappy

By Philosophistry.com - Feb 20th, 2008 at 2:44 pm EST

Thank you Sara from Scotland. I knew someone would be camping the RSS feeds on this community blogging system and would jump right in with the right info. Now THAT'S customer service.

Now, someone's got to be Debbie (or Danny in my case) Downer, and that'll be me. I only do it because I love this campaign. Anyway, not everything was groovy after that. I found out I was only half-way through my quest to vote early in the Texas Primary

When I went to the Obama Texas Link and punched in my address, nothing came up. They gave me a phone number in Austin to call. So I called, and I had to sit through 4 or 5 options "do you want Obama merchandise?" No. "Do you want to volunteer." No. I just want to do the ultimate, holy, and existential thing for this campaign, which is VOTE. I don't even want to register to vote. I just want to add another checkmark in Obama's column.

I finally got the "talk to an operator" button. And talked to someone for 5 minutes. But then I ended up just getting another phone number. And when I called them, I finally got a location.

Phew, ok. The total time it took from "idea" to "execution" was about 30 minutes. I got the idea to vote for Obama early watching his Houston video. And now, 30 minutes later, I'm going to get off my chair and vote.

I just want this whole thing to feel like Web 2.0

We got to make it easy for these people.

At every roadblock in the user experience path, some percentage of the users will give up and drop-out. If you add up all those percentages, you may be losing 50% of the people who in that moment of watching Obama's video would vote right now if it was extremely convenient.

This is the optimal experience:
- Google "Obama"
- Click the first link
- See and click a "Vote in upcoming primaries button"
- Punch in your zip code
- See a location with hours of operation
- User then gets up off their butt and wins another one for Obama.

OK. Lecture's over.

Better yet, how can I help relieve this frustration for other potential voters? Yeah? Aren't you glad I'm whining here and not on the Hillary forums, helping us instead of them?

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Frustrated User Experience Designer Wants to Vote Early in Texas

By Philosophistry.com - Feb 20th, 2008 at 1:59 pm EST

Half of this post is an honest attempt to get help in voting early in the Texas Primary. The other half of the post is to illustrate how inconvenient it appears to be to try to accomplish this.

I saw a YouTube Video of Obama holding up a flyer urging us that we should vote early tomorrow! So I think, "OK, I'm fired up." But wait how do I do this?

I Googled "Vote Early in Texas" and what comes up is a link to something about voting on election day? Is Mar. 4th an "election day?" it says nothing about primaries. I'm confused, and there's phone numbers to call?? I just close the page.

Then I Googled "Vote early texas democratic primary" and all I get is news about how the Hispanic vote is going to be crucial in the Texas primary.

I only have patience to Google about a couple times to answer a question. Finally I go to Obama's home page, and I'm scanning the front-page, and nowhere do I see a button that says "Vote for me now!" I'm already regisered to vote!

I didn't see a "contact us" button or anything, so I just decided to do the quickest thing I saw which was to write a blog.

So, here's what I want:

- Can someone please tell me how to vote early in the Texas Democratic Primary. I'm in Austin, TX

- Can someone put a button or something on the front-page of Obama's site that says "Vote Now!"

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