Day 4 - More Home Building
More work today on the home page wireframe. At first, I’d planned for the site to include only voting and display of results. But, as I was working on the page, I came up with the idea of having a place on the site to aggregate information of all kinds relating to the 2008 US presidential primary. “Primary Central” I dubbed it. I’m not sure yet how easy it will be to find and aggregate that information, and I may yet end up dropping the whole idea. But for now, it’s in there.
Originally, I wanted visitors 
to be able to cast their vote right on the home page. There would be something like a pair of radio buttons to choose which party, and a select box that would be filled with candidate names once you make your party choice. This would, I thought, encourage immediate involvement in the process. But since one element of the Online Primary experiment is to try “ranked choice” (also called “instant runoff”) voting, I felt the ballot needed the space of a whole page. So the voting action item on the home page became choosing your ballot.
That’s another place where my thinking evolved. Originally I planned just Republican and Democrat ballot choices. I was troubled a bit by omitting other parties (Green, Libertarian, et al), but also concerned about complexity that might be added by expanding the scope. Then, thinking about the “ranked choice” dimension, it occurred to me that a voter’s first choice might belong to one party, but a member of another party might be their second or subsequent choice. So I decided to add an “Open Primary” ballot option where all candidates would be available to choose from, including those from both major parties, other parties, and candidates (if any) running as independents.
As for results, I plan to display detailed results on a page devoted to that purpose, but I want the home page to show at least some highlight results. At first, I thought about having the home page show vote totals for just the current top two candidates in each primary, with a “more results” link. (I may still come back to that approach.) For now, though, I went with tabs for each primary, each tab having the simple vote totals for all candidates in the primary. To avoid implying bias toward any party, the active tab will be chosen randomly on each display of the page.