![](\"http:\/\/australianpolitics.com\/images\/usa\/2000elections\/butterfly-ballot2.gif\")
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The “Butterfly Ballot”, viewed through the non-political, pretty-objective standards usability people use, was a complete disaster. My class and I came up with a solid page of feedback just by going over it; I would have added that “observing people using the ballot, with an aim toward improving the design, would have been interesting” – but of course, we got that all over the news for the next two months.<\/p>\n
Before the election? That <\/em>might have been helpful.<\/p>\n The Times, eight years later, gets the message<\/a>:<\/p>\n The butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, Fla., was one of the great debacles in election history. It was so confusing that it was hard to tell which hole to punch to cast a vote for a particular candidate. Many people intending to vote for Al Gore accidentally punched the hole for Patrick Buchanan or punched holes for both Mr. Gore and Mr. Buchanan, which disqualified their votes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The design, by the way, was equally likely to draw votes away from Bush. But we’ll leave the Times<\/em> alone for the moment.<\/p>\n The controversy should have led to sweeping reforms, but it didn\u2019t. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law lists 13 ballot problems that show up around the country in election after election. One is creating a layout in which it is unclear what hole voters need to punch \u2014 or where they need to place a mark \u2014 to cast a vote for a particular candidate. Another is placing more than one contest on the same screen of a computer voting machine, which often leads voters not to vote in one of the races. Making matters worse, the instructions that accompany ballots are often confusing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The response from some commentators – “anyone who’s too stupid to use a ballot is too stupid to vote” – is the kind of thing most interaction designers<\/a> have heard from programmers, if we’ve been in the business long enough.<\/p>\n It’s wrong, of course; ballots should no more actively confuse, obfuscate or muddle people than should the software you use to do your job or balance your checkbook. In the private sector, the company with the more usable product usually wins. It’s a major reason “Quicken” has beaten “Microsoft Money” for the past decade and a half. It’s why Best Buy and Target and Amazon spend millions designing their real and online stores, and millions more observing how real people do interacting with them under real-world conditions.<\/p>\n Is the integrity of elections as important?<\/p>\n Congress should require that ballots used in federal elections meet minimum design standards. It should also mandate pre-election usability testing and make funds available for it. States and localities need to draw up better guidelines for how ballots are designed and clearer instructions to voters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Every once in a while, the Times <\/em>gets one right.<\/p>\n They should also publicly report after each election how many votes are lost because of miscast ballots.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There are, on the other hand, easier and cheaper ways<\/a> to accomplish this<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in 2000, I was teaching a “writing for the web” class at a local college. Since I was (and am) a Usability guy, I took a week or two to teach the basics of usability analysis. Fortunately we had a prime case study in the news. The “Butterfly Ballot”, viewed through the non-political, pretty-objective […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}