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User Experience and the 2004 Election
Oct 15, 2004
I generally avoid all politics in my column, but it's election season in America, and I can't help remembering last time around, when the now-infamous "butterfly ballot" brought user experience into national headlines for a couple of weeks. A simple design change would have made it much easier for users to vote for their intended candidates.
It remains to be seen if ballot designs have improved for this year's election. Last week on This Is Broken I featured a Michigan absentee ballot which, due to a printing error, looked even worse than the butterfly ballot. (Reports are that it has been re-printed with the problem fixed.)
This got me thinking about my own absentee ballot here in New York. The three-fold design includes instructions on one side and the ballot itself on the other. See small and large sizes of each here:
small instructions
large instructions
This, the standard ballot design, does not present any obvious problems. I'd say voters can reasonably be held to the standard of being able to fill this out.
Still, I note that this standard design is the product of election law, not of a concerted effort by designers to make a clear, usable ballot. Certainly there are ways the ballot could improve.
To take a small example, why is the voting oval pushed all the way to the lower right of the box, so that it's adjacent to the name of the rival party? I doubt that any would vote the first (Republican) oval thinking that they were voting Democrat... but it could be positioned better. In fact, any aspiring designers reading this should take a whack at redesigning the absentee ballot. I'll post the best redesigns in a future newsletter.
The real interface challenge this election, though, isn't the absentee ballot but the voting booth. In New York, we pull levers (good) from a convoluted matrix of choices (bad). Other U.S. states this year have a much better user interface (good) on electronic voting machines with no paper trail (bad).
Of course, redesigning "the system" in favor of the voter would take a lot more than redoing the ballot. To take one local example, election law - at least here in New York - heavily favors incumbents (guess who writes that law!), making many races a lot less competitive than they could be.
To illustrate the point, here's a neat Donkey Kong takeoff where you try to unseat the incumbent - personified as the huge gorilla at the top of the screen. (Also neat: there's an "easter egg" hidden on the game board.)
http://www.gothamgazette.com/votegame/con.html
I'm happy to see so many Webheads doing their part this year to improve the process - helping people register to vote, checking facts, and showing data in new ways. I especially appreciate the resources that are provided free of any partisan rants or propaganda; they merely help voters make a more informed decision, whichever party they choose. That's the Web at its best.
I'll leave you with some of the best sites I've found.
Factcheck.org calls out the distortions and fibs that *both* presidential candidates have delivered in the debates.
Jason Kottke put together a voting-registration guide.
The animations on this site make equal fun of both presidential candidates. ("This Land" is the best pick - scroll down to see it. Also note that the humor here is a bit "spicy" at points):
Living Room Candidate: Past election TV commercials.
Interesting (non-partisan) visualization of the timeline of George W. Bush's National Guard service.
Allan Keiter points us to his nonpartisan Flash app showing the electoral college. Click different states to see how the point totals might look in this fall's election.
Here's a site that shows an animation of how the likely electoral votes have shifted over the past few months.
MSNBC put together a visualization of the electoral votes.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6193646/
Finally, readers in New York should make an effort to see the Voting Booth Project, which brings together the work of well-known designers and artists (Gel 2004 speaker Christo, David Byrne, David Rockwell, and others), re-imagining the design of the voting booth.
Update 10/21: From the Mercury News today: "The elections board in Ohio's most populous county has fielded numerous calls from voters confused about the layout of absentee ballots."
You end a wonderful column with a notice for the exhibit, The Voting Booth Project, calling it "re-imagining the design of the voting booth" by well-known artists.
Although the work is interesting, it is "art" not "design". The works are commentary on voting, voting booths, democracy, and political statements. They are not designs of a voting booth.
I'd suggest that anyone interested in how to improve the design and usability of voting systems, instructions and other material visit http://www.electiondesign.org/case.html. Best of all, much of the work proposed by this project has been implemented by the Chicago Board of Elections. Their work is featured in the online Smithsonian exhibition: The Machinery of Democracy http://americanhistory.si.edu/vote/design.html.
As a bonus, all of the work was grounded in field research into the voting process and voter experience.
Whitney Quesenbery
UPA Voting and Usability Project
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_projects/voting_and_usability/
Mark,
As a member of the UPA Voting and Usability project, I was happy to see your column about ballots and ballot design. We also have an initiative going to amass a representative sample of ballots from across the US. Would you be willing to post a call for your readers to send in ballots?
There's lots of information about voting and ballot design at http://www.upassoc.org/upa_projects/voting_and_usability/index.html.
The information about how and where to send sample ballots is at http://www.upassoc.org/upa_projects/voting_and_usability/index.html.
Alice Preston
Usability Engineering
Telcordia Technologies
732.699.3285
That's just frightening, compared to our federal election ballots up here in Canada: a simple checklist of candidates (member of parliament candidate name, party, prime minister candidate name). The type is large and clear, and the checkboxes are large and well-placed. There is enough whitespace between lines to keep you from getting mixed up.
Mind you, it does help that there's only contest in the federal election: you vote to choose your member of Parliament, and the party that gets the most MPs in also wins the prime minister slot.