This was written on November 9, 2000

It was fascinating. I sat in a tea shop the other day and watched, for about 15 minutes, while customers tried to pull open the front door, a door which can only be pushed. The big brass door handle that stuck out into the street, begging to be pulled on, was a ruse.

After a while, I noticed another effect of the design. Customers leaving the tea shop, carrying a piping hot beverage in one hand and the rest of their stuff in the other, had to pull the door open to exit the cafe. They would set their tea down on the counter, open the door and awkwardly make their way through, grabbing the cup before the door closed on their hand.

As I watched this scene, drinking some tea that I’d fortunately purchased “for here”, I thought of Donald Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things, in which Dr. Norman discusses the design failures of so many door handles and light switches. After reading his book, when I find myself pulling on a door that only pushes, I think, “This isn’t my fault—it’s poor design!”

If we have significant problems designing usable doors and switches, do we have any chance of designing a usable voting ballot?

“The ballot is very straightforward,” said Palm Beach County Commissioner Carol Roberts about the “butterfly” ballot that came under much scrutiny in the 2000 presidential election. “You follow the arrow, you punch the location. Then you have voted for who you intend to elect.”

In the eyes of the ballot’s designers, the Palm Beach County ballot was as usable as it could be. It had large print, to accomodate people who are blinds as bats. It also had big arrows pointing to the holes for each candidate. The process couldn’t be any simpler, right? Like the woman said, you follow the arrow and punch the hole. Unfortunately, it’s now clear that this design was never tested. The design process failed, and after the election we were left with an alleged 19,000 double-stamped ballots in that county.

I asked Dr. Norman about the ballot’s design. “There are those who say that the fact that people made a mistake is due to their stupidity,” he said. “This is really bad thinking. If one person makes a mistake, it might be that person’s fault. When thousand do, it is bad design.”

The ballot’s original design seems to have had a number of restrictions. For example, the voting booths and ballot cards already existed, so the ballot itself had to be designed around the booth before the voter could be considered. One column of holes was necessary, and those holes had to be a certain distance apart. Another restriction lies in the ballot cards: The ballot cards needed to be as small as possible, to save space and make it easier for the vote counting machines. This meant less space between the buttons and a single column punch card.

That may have been fine if the choices could be presented in one column on the ballot. But the ballot’s large print was deemed an important factor, and it required a two column design. It was a sacrifice of one form of usability for another—making the ballot easier to use for visually impared voters, but harder to use for every voter. Wanting to avoid confusion, they compensated with the big arrows pointing to the buttons, but the arrows simply didn’t work. Maybe some other visual design would be usable and accomodate for all the design restrictions I’ve mentioned, but that’s beside the point: the chosen design failed.

Ahh, The Politics of Usability come into play heavily. Or, should I say, the Usability of Politics? The user interface is often the bane of a technology, even one as old and familiar as the mechanical voting booth, with its circa 1960s hole-punched paper ballot. Lets hope they get it right in 2002.