I've never written a meta-diary before, but I guess there's a first for everything.
My main beef can be summarized as follows:
- Those splash intro take action screens don't often render well on an iOS device, and they're annoying to get rid of on those devices.
- As a result, I, and probably many others don't actually read them.
- And because they appear all the time - every time this site is visited fresh, they actually undermine their purpose.
Let me expound a bit more:
- The bad rendering part is simply inexcusable in today's mobile internet environment. Enough said.
- I'm not against the idea of organizing people to take action at all, obviously. I'm not even against the idea of using splash screens in principle; but I am against the idea of bad, inefficient, and ineffective design.
- The idea that the same splash screen appears multiple times on multiple devices is simply silly; nobody's going to be nagged into doing the right thing...you want vitriol directed in the right place.
- The designers of this site should take a cue from slot machine designers. If the splash screens came on pseudo-randomly say, once every 5 times, they'd probably get more response. Naturally this depends on a certain extent to how frequently dailykos.com is visited...but it's not rocket science to experiment with frequency of splash screens and responses.
- Finally, having responded to various other calls to action from this site I get far too many e-mails from Democratic politicians and others. Yeah, I unsubscribe to their lists, but I suspect that the political action spam and calls for donations dissuade others from responding. Like I said, I'm pretty active in contacting political folks to let them know where I stand and what-not, but there's way too much after-spam.
Oh, and apropos of the design of this site...how come you have to switch back to desktop view to login on a mobile device? Or is this Ph.D. missing something obvious?
I realize that Meta diaries often generate lots of heat, and as I said I do want people to be encouraged to organize on the internet for action. I just think the current way is self-limiting for at least some reasons that can easily be corrected.