Here are the scenario design questions with answers:
What are the target users?
Answer: Persons that are unsure of whom to vote for, independents trying to find out candidates and policies, democrats and/or republicans trying to know better their candidates and opponents’ proposals and philosophies.
What are their key goals?
Answer: There are two different answers for this question, first from the functional perspective to determine who users should vote for based on how similar their political beliefs are to the various candidates running for the office of the president and/or to learn more about the political views of the various candidates running for office. Second is the founder’s perspective quoting:
“iSideWith.com was started in March 2012 by two friends with two very different views of politics. We are constantly finding and building new ways to boost voter engagement and education using information, data, and breaking technologies.”
How can I help them accomplish their goals?
Automate topics and political trends with text mining and sentiment analysis so the questionnaire keeps relevant and more efficient Recommend workflows of questions (recommender system improvement) while ranking users with similarities and really narrowing the profiling intent. Show more interactive visualizations and relationships among other users with similar “Political Taste”
In short, users answer questions and weight their answers. The more questions that are answered, the more accurate the recommendation is. The answers to their questions are matched to the responses and weighting given by the candidates as determined by the site owners. The site owners determine this information by looking at news articles, voting records, interviews, party platforms, and other sources of information about the candidate. Seems to be a very basic ranking and scoring algorithm maybe some sort of Classification implementation too to group users by political trends
The approach of profiling thru closed question is a pretty effective but old concept showing that their statistical approach might not be as thorough. Collecting more data will make better opportunity for analysis, sometimes giving chance to people with common interests will be prone to share more and that could be helpful not only on how they align to current political trends but to actually propose new ones being a bidirectional channel with politicians.
The recommender system is basic in nature so increasing things like if you like this political principle you may like these ones two, will make the questionnaire more efficient and the information gathering more valuables.
Automating Harvesting of information and analysis will be another good improvement to keep the site relevant. Finally, sentiment analysis on proposal and even make more open questions and mine the answers for analysis.