Site Review — Leave Your Print
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
Leave Your Print‘s straightforward and minimal interface is an excellent way to engage the citizens of Utah in the election process.
Leave Your Print is a site that was put together in order to encourage the citizens of Utah to participate in the State’s election process. It uses the Tweak Content Management System from Agency Fusion which I’d never heard about until I looked at the source code for this site, but from a glance at the site, looks like a pretty impressive solution for use by a government entity.
The site’s main strength comes from the elegance and concision of the content. Many government sites dump too much content on their pages, or put content out there that citizens have no desire to see. Leave Your Print only offers the main things you need to know about voting in Utah. A few of the areas don’t have any content in them, which is a personal peeve of mine. If there is no content for the “In The News” portion, then “In The News” shouldn’t be live on the page.
The privacy policy might be a bit too laconic. It mentions some various Utah Code references that apply to voter privacy, but don’t reproduce the text or link to it for interested parties to peruse. My favorite portion of the site is the voter search form. The Polling Location Search at Cuyahoga County’s BOE has produced some consistent usability issues that can probably be addressed by taking a cue from Leave Your Print.
Leave Your Print is an excellent site for a specific tactical target. It doesn’t suffer from most government design woes, such as poor design and implementation, content bloat or scope creep. It doesn’t look like it was made to stroke someone’s ego or to increase bureaucracy. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d say that the State of Utah hired Agency Fusion to put the site together instead of having it done in-house. More on that guess later.
