The form that changed *everything*

If this post rocks your world in any small way, please consider backing my Kickstarter. It's called Field Guides To Ensuring Voter Intent. 

There's a lot of crap going on in the world right now: terrorism, two major wars, and worldwide economic collapse. Let’s not forget the lack of movement on climate change and serious unrest in the Middle East and other places.

People trust governments less than ever -- perhaps because of the transparency that ambient technology brings -- leading to more regulation of privacy and security, but also to protests. Protests that started in Egypt have rippled around the world.  

This wave started with a butterfly. Not the butterfly of chaos theory, but there is a metaphor here that should not be missed: when a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon rainforest, there are ripple effects that you might not realize. The butterfly I am talking about is the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida in the US 2000 presidential election. 

Palm Beach County, Florida November 2000 ballot

Design affects world peace

A ballot is a form. A form used in one of the most important interactions between a government and its citizens. This particular form changed everything.

This ballot, like every government form, is the culmination of a set of design decisions that were well intentioned, but also took constraints into account. 

The way the voting system in Palm Beach County worked – it is no longer in use there -- is that there is a little booklet mounted on a slot that a card fits in. The spine of each double page spread has a series of holes down it. The voter finds the candidate she wants to vote for, and presses a point through the hole to push a perforated box out of the card in the slot behind the little book.  When you’re finished voting, you slide the card out from behind the book and drop it into a ballot box. At the end of Election Day, the cards are run through a computer to tabulate the votes. This is a computing technology from the 1960s, but for a voting system, it worked fine for a very long time.

A punchcard ballot system from Los Angeles County

 It worked until a well-intentioned public servant, who wanted to help her overwhelmingly older voters read and use the ballot, decided to make the type larger than this ballot normally allowed.  In proper use of this ballot template, all the candidates are lined up on the left side of the spread. But increasing the type size flowed the candidates for president onto two pages, creating an interlaced effect. This made the choices difficult to line up properly.

Vote for Republican candidates by punching the first hole. 

Vote for Democrats by punching... which?   

If you wanted to vote for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, which hole do you punch? Thousands of voters thought it was the second one. It wasn't. Punching that hole casts a vote for Pat Buchanan. Pat Buchanan is an ultra conservative, Christian fundamentalist, and a very unlikely choice for the many liberal, retired people who lived in Palm Beach County, Florida. 

Vote for Reform party candidates by punching the second hole 

While the design decision seemed like the right one because it took users into account, it was done without data, without testing the new design for its usability, by someone trained and practiced in public administration, but not in design. 

World peace through design: Lessons from crises
Now, there ARE amazing, excellent things going on in design that are changing the world in excitingly good ways. Many of those good things are happening in election design. Unfortunately, most of these are in response to crises.  But never mind. The point is, we're at the cusp of a movement in design for good, moving toward a future of world peace through design. Let me show you just a few examples.

After a contested election in Minnesota for a seat in the US Senate that Al Franken eventually won by just a few hundred votes, the official in charge of elections in that state decided to usability test and redesign absentee ballots there. She loved what she learned from the process so much after working on absentee ballots that her team went on to work on other important forms, such as voter registration forms.

In New York State, after being sued for usability problems with the new vote tabulating systems, the board of elections conducted usability tests on three prototyped messages.  With the assistance of the voting system manufacturers, the board and a few advisors came up with messages and designs that will work on two different voting systems, within state laws, across 62 counties. The board of elections staff has also received basic training in user research, ballot design, plain language, and usability testing.

At the federal level, one response to the mortgage meltdown was to form the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Its first task was to rewrite and redesign disclosures given to borrowers to make them easier to read, understand, and act on. Before the mortgage crisis, borrowers didn’t understand the consequences of borrowing the types of loans they were borrowing. Design will now make a difference for both lenders and borrowers.

The thing is, design in civic life, and I would call all of these examples from civic life, is good for business. When the business of government includes design as a priority, costs of development and support are lower than when design is not consciously, actively part of the process of delivery to citizens. And business benefits from good design in civic life because it keeps regulation and costs down for suppliers. Unintended negative outcomes are much less likely when design decisions are informed by data. Simple usability tests could have prevented people voting counter to their intentions. Simple usability tests could have prevented borrowers from making decisions counter to their best interests.




Don't let it happen again

We’ve seen what well intentioned but poor design decisions can do. (The product manager who tweaks something at the last minute?) There are some gaps in what we know about ballot design that could make the difference for thousands of voters in the next national election. Let’s learn how to design for those gaps and help local election officials make good design decisions. If you do user research and usability testing as part of your job, I encourage you to volunteer in your local election department to proofread ballots and other voter-facing materials, or be a poll worker, or both.

Don’t let the butterfly ballot happen again.

If this post rocks your world in any small way, please consider backing my Kickstarter. It's called Field Guides To Ensuring Voter Intent. 

Voting: The 233-year-old design problem

Whenever I talk about my involvement in voting and elections, whoever I'm chatting with invariably asks:

1. Why is it so hard to design a good looking ballot that prevents voters from making mistakes?
   
2. Why doesn't the whole country use the same voting system?
   
3. Don't they have UX people working on elections?

Design in elections is a wicked problem. And I think designers will be fascinated with learning what the constraints really are. So, I decided to take it to big audience - South by Southwest Interactive 2011. I need your help to get on the program. Please go to the 'panel picker' and vote for my session.

Just to give you a head start, here's the description:

Do you think the "butterfly ballot" was an isolated problem? How did the hanging chad become a world-class design problem? Did you know our 43rd president was chosen because of a decision made about font size? By someone who was not a trained designer? Did you know that the presidential election in 2000 was not the first - or last - time that design problems affected the outcome of an election? If you're trained in design, interested in fair elections, or looking for a way to affect world peace, come to this panel. This is probably the most important panel in the Free World. And we're not kidding.

Please vote Yes, This rocks! before August 27, 2010. 

[Yes, this is cross-posted to my blog about ballot design and accessibility. Sorry if that was confusing.]

User interfaces make Fast Company's biggest design moments of the last decade

Of the 14 items that Fast Company chose to include in its selection of the biggest design moments of the years 2000-2009, there were five that were notable for their importance as breakthroughs in user interface and user experience design.

Three were specifically related to technology. I'm guessing that most of us will not think of the others as either technology or as part of a user experience design.

iPod

There was, of course Apple's iPod, introduced in 2001. The iPod isn't a great piece of audio technology, and never has been. But it is a cool, fun, fashion statement that integrates nearly seamlessly with Apple's other products, especially iTunes. So there's the experience. But the iPod also created a new look for selecting songs on a small device, which interestingly, has evolved over the decade from a multi-button (circle within a circle) user interface physical click to a slick, integrated multi-purpose magic circle that's closer to gestural.  

    2001                                                                                   
2009

Apple.com

Wii

In 2006 the Wii rocked video gaming by making games interactive in a very different way – no more joy stick, no more keyboard – and creating games that inspired people to be more physically active.

Nintendo.com

Multi-touch screens and gestural interfaces, large and small

Can you say, "I love my iPhone"? I do. Giving the feeling of interacting more directly with the phone, music, games, photos, and other applications, touch screens are finding their way into nearly every UI with a screen. Always good? Maybe not. But it's a good experiment, probably on the way to something better. I just wish someone could figure out a way for me to use my iPhone when it's 30 degrees out and I have gloves on.

 

















multi-touch-screen.com 

Blackberry.com

 














The above technologies all fit neatly into many lives these days and affect a much larger user experience. These elegant UIs are on things that most people would consider non-essential. Design made big inroads in healthcare, democracy, and sustainability, too. But there were two more important user interface design accomplishments featured by Fast Company that made huge differences in how many people take medicine and how many more will vote in elections in the future.



 

Clear Rx from Target
Deborah Adler created a beautifully designed package for Target's Design For All campaign in 2005. But the package is just a vehicle for clearer, more readable labels with larger type that make taking medicine safer. In addition, Adler created other effective and beautiful, brilliant ways of identifying which drug is in the bottle and who should be taking it, with cleverly labeled the tops for quick recognition, and color coding by family member.

Target.com

Design for Democracy 

Perhaps the most important design moment of the last decade was the US presidential election in 2000 because it inspired the AIGA to institutionalize a project that had started in 1998 called Design for Democracy. The project was commissioned by the US Elections Assistance Commission to create design guidelines, templates, and specifications for optical scan ballots, election signage, and other election-related materials. I am very proud of having been involved as a consulting expert on the research led by Mary Quandt for the Effective Designs for the Administration of Federal Elections to develop the guidelines, which were published in 2007.

Call your county elections office and ask them to adopt the guidelines now. Offer to help them do it. Counties that have already adopted these best practice design guidelines for ballots have encountered happier, more confident voters, and lower costs for litigation and recounts – improving the experience of elections all the way around.

aiga.org/design-for-democracy

May Design have fewer serious problems to solve and more fun to create in the new decade.




EDITED 1/21/2010 to add:
Scot Marvin wrote to tell me that his brilliant wife, Tara Starr, had cleverly doctored a pair of regular, knitted gloves to use with her iPhone, by sewing lovely flowers on the fingertips using conductive thread. The thread produces a working connection between the finger and the iPhone through the glove. Love it.