Ask HN: Please review our web app - TellMyPolitician.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review our web app - TellMyPolitician.com

tellmypolitician.com

22 pointsmileszs22 comments

(Mostly reviewing the site design here, because that concerned me the most.)

* What resolution are you designing for? I'm at a measly 1024X768 and still there's a _lot_ of screen real estate wasted.

* The logo at the top is quite dull - and the 'Be Heard' is near invisible. I think reading that tag line makes your site much more appealing, so make sure viewers see it.

* Much of the text there reads like full of weasel words. "Makes your content more powerful" sounds like utter marketing bullshit, which most people are tired of.

* The backdrop 'curtain' is beautiful. Good work there.

* Make it more obvious that the app is aimed at web publishers; the 'your readers' in the first paragraph hints at that, but it can be made more obvious.

I really like the site layout and colors. One thing: your css relies on Verdana; you should have a backup set of fonts, the last in the series being sans serif (something like font-family:Verdana,Arial,Luxi Sans,sans-serif;).

Cambria is pretty and popular now (vista font), but it is broke on my fedora 10 box. It doesn't get skipped, it displays badly.

I think the site is a cool idea. Do you intend to sell ads?

I work with mileszs on TellMyPolitician. We are trying to get feedback on how to better present this to publishers to entice them to place our button on their site. We eventually want to have our tool added to the likes of addthis and sharethis as well.

We would also love to here your opinion on the tool and how to make it better for users who are trying to contact their politician. Please let us know what you think. We are grateful for any feedback you have.

We originally submitted this to the apps for america contest with sunlight labs. We didn't do as well as we hoped, partly we feel, because we didn't do a very good job showing where our real value lies, which is as a button on news sites. We hoped our new design will better emphasis that goal.

I can see how this will result in politicians being flooded with a lot of emotionally-driven comments and rants and therefore be less productive than some coordinated effort which has a backbone of reasoning.

So you may want to consider a way to create something like I just watched this video, I would like to hear more about the issues than this one video presented to me and then contact their rep.

I hear where you are coming from. That is partly why we included multiple ways to contact their politician, as well as only allow people to search for their politician by location instead of by name. We want to help out actual constituents, because that is who politicians are most likely to listen to.

There are several tools out there that people use that let people create a form letter on a site and then send that to their politician. The problem with these systems, is that they aren't real people contacting their politicians, they are mass emails, that flood politicians in boxes. Hopefully, our tool will help real constituents contact their representatives with real concerns.

We know right now we won't totally eliminate that problem, but are open to suggestions about how to eliminate them.

Thank you for your input.

This reminds me of a UK site called WriteToThem.com (http://www.writetothem.com), formerly FaxYourMP.com, which provides an interface to contact your local MP automatically, either via e-mail or fax.

The people behind it later went on to form mySociety (http://www.mysociety.org/projects/) and sites such as TheyWorkForYou (http://www.mysociety.org/projects/theyworkforyou/), the official Government Petitions website (http://www.mysociety.org/projects/no10-petitions-website/), among others.

TellMyPoliticianViaHandWrittenLetter.com would be more effective in my experience. Politicians might not feel guilty ignoring an email/e-communication, but a hand written letter, personally stamped is harder to ignore. A state of Maryland politician in a town hall meeting I went to made this point clear during our towns last NIMBY fight.

If I think about the pain points from the perspective of the person supporting whatever issue they are writing about a few ideas spring to mind.

If you could take your app one step further and actually connect the reader to their representative that would be great! Getting people to follow through is the toughest part when asking for this type of action. (I seem to recall a click to call service being reviewed here on HN a while back that could broker a two way connection like this.)

It would also be great to know how effective an article/person/web site/etc. was at getting people to contact their representatives. This information can be really important to smaller - grass roots - efforts.

An example: www.letcongressknowaboutlyme.com The site creator is trying to collect information via email.

I installed the plugin for wordpress, but it seems like the links it generates are redirecting incorrectly. Try http://www.tellmypolitician.com/search/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.g... - for me it redirects to http://tellmypolitician.comsearch/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google...

Thank you for pointing that out. If you send a request through the site, we can let you know when we have it fixed. Or email me at info at tellmypolitician dot com

Number of times I have contacted my politician since becoming of voting age: 4

Number of times I felt it did anything: 0

Number of times that I received a response which gave me the impression that at most, i gave them additional marketing information - how many people disagree with what's going on: 4

The last letter I sent, which was about Net Neutrality, went into a lot of detail on how their ideas for how to curb child pornography online would do nothing to actually deter it, how easily it is to get around their idea, how people involved in those markets make it around and aren't averse to using a little more tech, and how their ideas do threaten what does work on the net - it's openness. I made an item by item list of the perceived benefits of their change and why they won't work.

I received a generic response that my representative is working hard to get rid of child pornography on the net, and how this measure will help to do so, listing a number of the reasons that I had argued against while providing nothing more.

Conclusion: writing to politicians is as useful as writing to the mob with policy ideas.

I'd like to recommend that you consider doing something I did last year. I ran for office. Something that I think less than 1 in 1000 Americans do at any time during their entire life.

It was a small office, and at the state level. I collected (all by myself) the signatures needed to get on the ballot. The entire campaign came out of my pocket (I spent less than $200 and took no contributions from anyone).

My campaign slogan turned into no, you can't have a pony because of all the demands that everyone made.

That generic response is because very few politicians have the time to even read the addresses on every letter they get. And the way our country has reponded is (and the response is in my opinion the absolutely wrong one) to create the lobbying industry. By throwing money at the politicians, they're getting the access that you should have gotten as a constituent.

I learned one heck of a lot of stuff. About me. About the press. About politics. About all the ways one can screw stuff up. About how little that the majority of people care about things. It wasn't at all like Mr Smith Goes To Washington.

The search functionality needs to be on the homepage, so I can immediately see the benefits of your product.

Also, I think you should be marketing the search functionality and not the button. Make it easy to find a politician's information and then make it easy to contact them and you will find more people will use your button.

There are many sites out there that will get you a politicians contact information. We want to be an alternative that a site like Huffington post, Townhall, CNNPolitics, and others can use to on their site so that their readers don't have to search on another site. It helps publishers out by keeping readers on their page longer, hopefully.

You should look into what happened with GovWorks.com and try to avoid their mistakes. Research should be easy: there was even a movie made about them.

getting people to traverse pages and fill out forms is tough. however there are so many politically relevant comments generated on the web yet they arent directed to politicians. tapping into this existing content production would be a great goal and integration would be the mantra to get you there. a button is not deep enough and doesnt meet the expectations of a modern web user.

As a modern web user, what are your expectations? How do you see a tool like this working. Thank you for your input.

I think simplicity for the user is important, but whats even more important is simplicity for the representative. Ultimately all change rests in their hands, and if your solution makes their lives and jobs more complicated, they're liable to ignore it.

Imagine getting 1000 passionate emails on a topic that have nothing to do with your job, or demanding we do something about clean air when you've already supported every clean air bill that's gone through your office. By increasing the noise they have to deal with, you make it even harder for real issues to get through to them. Focus on designing this solution around how it would be beneficial to the reps, and how they could better understand whats important to their constituents so they can get reelected.

Heres some quick ideas on how to possibly accomplish this:

1) Let people click a button if a story or issue is important to them and allowing them to add comments. As a rep, seeing 1000 emails is overwhelming, but having a control panel that can easily show you how many people care about different issues is helpful. It could sort the different stories / issues by activity, and you could read comments if it looked like a lot of people cared about it so you could get a better idea of what the sentiment was.

2) Somehow show what the stance of your rep is on that issue. Theres no reason to blast them with comments if they're already supporting the issue.

In summation: If you make something that the reps want to use, then people will gravitate towards it so they can get their voice heard, but if you make something that they don't like, then it doesn't matter how great your users think it is. If it doesn't lead to change, they'll eventually stop using it.

i expect my context and my attention within it are treated with absolute respect. godly.

if im making a comment of political relevance id like it sent to my rep for me rather than filling out forms and/or repeating myself on your site.

the relevance and the routing would be a function of where i am commenting, i.e. im on a political site that you have made a relationship with.

A recommendation: consider state legislators as well. Perhaps in your next revision?

I only saw the 2 senators and 1 representative in DC. I didn't see any of my congresscritters in Denver (I live in Colorado).

What do you think of www.govit.com/email_congress

A little bit nicer flow.

This is really cool. I just used it on my site.

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