STC Usability SIG Newsletter
Voters Learn the Importance of Usability

by Whitney Quesenbery

It has been an exciting few months, what with the usability flaws in the "butterfly ballot" in Florida possibly changing the course of history.

The good news is that the controversy put usability into the public conversation with news articles, press releases, and even new research articles. It was an opportunity to explain "what we do" to friends, relatives, and associates. Some of the lessons from the 2000 Presidential election are the basics of Usability 101.

1. It’s easy to make it worse instead of better. The biggest irony is that the two-column design of the ballot was part of an attempt to make it easier to read. The designer took one fact—that larger type is more readable—and applied it to the ballot without considering the whole design. Good intentions are not enough. It takes user-centered design and usability skills, applied to well understood user requirements, to make a good product.
2. A "review" is not the same as a usability test. It is true that the political parties and the election commissioners approved the ballot. But what were they approving? They probably just checked to make sure that the candidates’ names were spelled correctly, that they were all the same type size, and that the ballot conformed to the rules. We’ve all seen interfaces that met a standard but were still not usable. The same principle applies here.
3. You have to observe interaction in context. After the fact, it is easy to see the information design flaws in the ballot. But a ballot is not just read. It must be put into the voting machine, pages must be turned, chads punched out, and so on. In the context of actual use, interaction problems stand out more clearly. That’s why it is so important to observe real users performing real tasks.
4. User assistance is part of the interface. The official instructions told voters to "be sure to vote on every page." Taken literally, this meant they would vote twice for President because the list of candidates was split between two pages. Obviously, no one conducted a usability walk-through, trying to use the ballot by carefully following the instructions. The ballot designers were so familiar with how the voting machines worked that they could no longer anticipate what would be ambiguous or confusing. Sound like any software you know?
5. It’s easy to blame the user. A lot of humor was directed at the "stupidity" of the voters. Even people on a usability e-list made comments about how easy they had found a similar ballot. Others suggested that usability always have a margin of error. Maybe we’ve gotten away with poor usability in the past, but as computers become more ubiquitous, usability must become more universal. Designs—especially for compulsory interfaces—will have to work for all people, not just the "typical users" in the center of the curve.
6. Everything gets usability tested. The only question is whether the evaluation is done in a controlled setting or with your first 400,000 users.

Don’t let this opportunity to explain the importance of usability pass you by. Use it to start a conversation, to suggest usability activities in your product plan, to make a point. Change the history of your product…for the better.

A special topics page on the election provides links to news articles, press releases, ballot photos, cartoons, and a collection of user quotes culled from the news stories.