Answers with Nick Boutelier

Answer 1

What is iSideWith.com?

iSideWith is an interactive, non-partisan website that helps voters track how their political views compare to their friends, political parties, candidates and state ballot measures. Users answer a series of questions on important national issues including taxes, Medicare and Gay Marriage and local issues such as term limits and eliminating state income taxes. After they have completed the questionnaire, a complex algorithm provides a ranking, by percentage, of which friends, parties, candidates and issues they side with.

Answer 2

What motivated you to create iSideWith?

Taylor (Peck) and I were roommates after college and we both had very different backgrounds when it came to politics.  I am a web engineer and artist who didn't have time to follow politics while Taylor was a political news junkie from a very young age. We didn't have a medium to compare and contrast how our views aligned. We created iSideWith as a tool to compare (issue by issue) our political beliefs. We then saw the opportunity for how this could save other voters time and how engaging the social aspect of it was. We believe that if voters are reminded which political issues are important to them and are shown how their views align with political candidates, they will be more likely to vote and influence their friends and family to do so. We designed our quiz to appeal to everyone from political junkies to undecided voters. Users can spend 3 minutes or 1 hour on the quiz. If you feel passionately about a topic (the economy for example) we allow you to expand the questions in that section to see more advanced questions. Politics is not always black and white, so we also allow users the ability to choose expanded versions of "yes, and..." or "no, but..." answers and even write in their own personal answer.

Answer 3

How do you decide what questions to ask on iSideWith.com?

Through a combination of data analysis and user feedback. The news section of our site analyzes thousands of articles per day to find issues that are trending by region. We use that data combined with daily suggestions from users to add new questions. If we see a local or national issue explode in popularity during the day, we will usually have it up on the quiz later that day. Since we display the live results of all of our data, it's really interesting to instantly see how America is dividing on a new issue that didn't exist earlier.

Answer 4

What changes are you making to iSideWith for the 2014 elections?

For the 2014 midterm elections, we focused on five important questions voters will ask in November: "Who" should they vote for, "What" can they vote on, "When" can they vote, and "Where" can they vote. We then designed a voter guide that organizes all the answers to those questions into one highly personalized and localized resource that will save voters hours of researching which local candidates and ballot measures they side with all the way down to their city officials. We launched a beta version of our voter guide in mid July covering most of their state officials and will be adding city officials on a daily basis starting in August.

Answer 5

What has been the most surprising thing about the results you find with iSideWith?

It was surprising to see there are some issues where voters strongly divide with their party leaders. This is more apparent on a city and county level, but it's very interesting to see that leaders can still be very out of touch with their constituents on specific issues. Last year we started segmenting answers by U.S. Census data, so it's also interesting to dig through the polling results pages to see see how users of different income, education, and race divide on issues.

Answer 6

According to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, only 57.5% of all eligible voters cast a ballot for the 2012 Presidential Election. Do you think social media sites like iSideWith will help increase the number of Americans who vote in the 2016 election?

Yes, we feel that discussing issues with friends helps voters organize and clarify their beliefs as well as getting them more engaged and passionate about voting. The challenge for social media, in terms of politics, is creating an environment that fosters productive political conversations. Some social media sites are notorious for unproductive political discussion which turns many people off to politics. Earlier this year we tested a forum concept with two separate groups of our users. The first group of users were allowed to see how they sided with each user they entered a conversation with. The second group was not allowed to see how they sided with the user they were having a conversation with. It was amazing to see that the first half of users resulted in much more productive conversations, even on issues they had polarizing viewpoints on. Users were seeking out users with opposing beliefs, wanting to hear their point of view. The second group of users had a much greater number of conversations that died quickly or ended in flame wars. We noticed that when users enter a conversation knowing where the other person is coming from, it creates a buffer of understanding, intrigue, and productive conversation.

Answer 7

Why do you think so many Americans choose not to vote in national mid-term elections?

In the past I didn't vote during midterm elections because it was too difficult. It took a lot of time and it was difficult to gather all the information. Once I found the information, it was filled with rhetoric designed to mislead instead of give a straight stance on policy issues. Our goal for the midterm elections is to organize information so users can make decisions based on how a policy or candidate aligns with their political beliefs, instead of rhetoric.

Answer 8

Have you received any feedback from visitors who took the Political Party Quiz?

Yes, our whole model and processes of the site is built around analyzing and implementing user feedback. It's absolutely critical for monitoring our accuracy and developing new features. On an average day, we receive over 1,500 suggestions for adding additional answers to questions on our quiz. We eventually had to build internal tools to help us process all the feedback we receive to find common threads so we can quickly respond and act on user feedback.

Answer 9

Do visitors tend to align with a single political party on the quiz, or are they generally a blend of alignments? What do you think that says about visitors? About the party system?

We tend to see a blend of alignments. There is a lot of overlap between parties, especially when you add in smaller, less known parties. However, even if two parties were to have the same stance on every issue, they would most likely differ in how they rank the importance each issue. This is why we strongly recommend that users select which issues are most or least important to them so they can be matched with a party that not only reflects their answers, but also their priority of issues.

Answer 10

Has iSideWith been as successful overseas as it has been in the US?

Yes, and we would probably say that it has been most successful in the UK. After the 2012 Presidential Election, we focused on building internal tools that would allow us to scale our model internationally. Our system allows us to quickly find which issues are trending in a country as well as finding all the varying stances on those issues. The refinement of that process combined with the UK's passion for politics would explain the success of iSideWith overseas. Last year, we overcame the challenge of scaling internationally. Earlier this year, we feel we finally cracked the barriers to scaling this on a hyper-local city politics level and will be using a brand new set of features to help voters choose their local candidates and proposed legislation in the 2014 US Midterm and the 2015 Canadian and UK General elections.