Transcript for "Can Usability Save Elections?"

Whitney Quesenbery at World Usability Day NYC UPA, November 10, 2011

Sponsored by NYC UPA and Bloomberg. Transcript courtesy of c2ccaptioning.com

The full video of this event is available: http://www.nycupa.org/Default.aspx?pageId=260219

This clip is available: http://www.slideshare.net/whitneyq/can-ux-save-elections



      In 2000, we had a couple of elections you might remember.  Out of that I started on 

a journey that seems to still be going on.  I keep trying to get out of it and get dragged 

back in which is to ask the question, can user experience actually change elections?  

Given the enormous complexity of them.  Now, in 2000 --

      (Laughter)

      You may remember the chads.  That election went on for a while.  But at the same 

time there was another election, the UPA international election happened, right at the 

same time and I happened to get elected to the board of directors, and they said, you're 

going to beat head of outreach, and you're going to go do something about elections.

      (Laughter)

      Now, I was a little usability person.  I did interesting projects, I thought.  There was 

nothing in my past to prepare me to do something about elections, although I did grow up 

in New York City.  And I thought that what everybody does on Sundays is a couple 

hundred thousand of your closest friends marched down Fifth Avenue.

      (Laughter)

      So I did grow up in a social -- context of social activism.  But there was nothing 

about that that made me think that we could actually change elections.  So when we 

looked at the chads, it was pretty clear that that was a design problem.  And we all 

thought -- did a lot of thinking about how many thousands of people you'd have to test to 

find that error.  But the thing that really struck me was this quote from Theresa LePore 

who was the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections which is, she said, "I was just 

trying to make the text bigger.  I know we had a lot of elderly people in my district, and 

they needed larger text."  That was when I realized how difficult and problematic this was 

going to be, because she had one piece of a puzzle, make the text bigger.  She didn't 

have the rest of the puzzle which is make it designed well.  You might ask, why is it that 

nobody noticed that this error was going to happen?  It's because it's a usability problem.  

When they checked the ballots, they checked the cards that went onto the little thing that 

you -- where you mounted the -- the little carve-outs you put the punch card under and 

you punch through the holes.  Nobody actually tried to use it.  They just read it.  They did 

a quality check, not a usability check.  And everything about how elections work is a kind 

of procedural process.  It's been going on that way for a lightning time and it's all about -- 

long time, and it's all about political parties and procedures that are well enshrined.  

There's a lot of procedural validation of the election but there's very little check on does it 

actually work for people?  Does it actually engage citizens and make them want to vote?  

When we look around this country, I went to vote yesterday at the end of the day.  I was 

the 92nd person.  I live in a tiny town but still 92, 92nd person at my polling station is a 

pretty pathetic answer.  So one of the questions we have to ask is how do we engage 

people more?

      So in 2002, as a result of what happened in Florida, the Help America Vote Act was 

passed and it created a new federal agency called the Election Assistance Commission 

and I got appointed to buy on a federal advisory committee, which is pretty cool.  We 

wrote the guidelines for voting systems in this country.  They're called guidelines because 

the Federal Government doesn't actually run elections, but in fact, they're a standard.  

They're a standard in which anybody who wants to sell a voting machine in this country 

kind of has to meet in these day.  It's been a long and painful process because that was 

2002.  We put the person out in 2005.  That meant it went into 2007.  By which time we 

had written a new version.

      (Laughter)

      Which is actually in public comment but it will be in public comment for a long time 

because right now there are only two commissioners.  But there's four commissioner 

seats and without a quorum, they can't do anything.

      (Laughter - Oh, my God!)

      Another thing that happened was that we started connecting with regular everyday 

civil rights organizations like the Brennan Center for Justice which is at NYU.  We did a 

project called Better Ballots, which is interesting because it -- the political scientists 

punched numbers and they look for little odd anomalies.  Found a number of elections 

where there were errors that can be explained.  There were too many mistakes, people 

who either showed up at the poll and undervoted, like Sarasota 2006, or showed up and 

cast too many votes and invalidated their ballot, and then we went back and we looked at 

the ballots and said, well, in hindsight, can we see what the problem was?  And it turned 

out that the problems were things like really complicated, difficult to understand language, 

and ballot with weird designs, and strange things that happened like a candidate was 

thrown off the election -- the ticket less than a week before the election after the ballots 

had been printed and so now they had whited-out the middle.  Very strange things that 

happened around the whole legal process.

      We started looking at them and saying, what could be done?  And took those 

results around and started talking to election officials.  I have to back up a second and say 

that there was another project that started also in 2000 in Chicago in response to all of 

this.  The AIGA started a project called Design for Democracy.  They took the really ugly 

ballots, also punch card butterfly ballots, created a better design and then were hired by 

the Election Assistance Commission to create best practice designs.  So these two 

threads of work kind of come together where we can start to say, okay, we've done some 

research.  They actually researched it.  They did pilot tests.  They did pilot elections.  They 

did usability testing.  So we're looking at designs that have been pretty well validated.  

How far away from that were the ballots that caused problem?  And what can we do to 

change that?  And all of a sudden, I don't think it was just us, but time had come when 

election officials started to listen to it.  And began to think about what they can do in their 

own election districts to make a difference.

      Now, you might think that we'd really gotten somewhere, but this is the sample 

ballot in New York City 2010.

      (Laughter)

      It's a really stellar piece of design.

      (Laughter)

      And it had a really interesting piece of -- which is that on the back of the ballot the 

instructions said that you were to mark the oval above the name of the candidate you 

wished to vote for.

      (Oh no!)

      The only saving grace of this is it happened on the back of the ballot in six-point 

type so no one actually read it.

      (Laughter)

      So I don't think anybody voted for DeNapoli thinking they were voting for 

Schneiderman but we don't actually know that.  In the trying to know something about it, 

he began to think, what can we do about this?  There are 3,000 some counties in the 

United States.  Elections are locally run.  It means that you have to have an impact in 

many, many places.  

      So three quick projects that we did.  First we run flash tests with the Brennan 

Center.  On one Saturday afternoon with 12 usability professionals and bunch of people 

from Brennan Center got together.  We went out to five locations in four boroughs and is 

we accosted strangers on the street and asked them if they would stop and fill in a ballot.  

And we looked at those ballots to see what kind of errors they were make making and 

gave Brennan Center a big pile of data for one afternoon.  We were able to do something 

that was kind of fun, that we knew how to do, that we could organize, and that further, 

took a project out of the realm of argument and into the realm of let's talk about the data.  

There was another project that followed on from there which unfortunately there's a 

lawsuit that was not settle yet so soon, soon, soon, I hope to talk about this but not yet.

      (Laughter)

      The other thing we can do is build communities to support election officials. 

Brennan -- another Brennan Center story, called us up and said, we're working on 

changing the election law in Minnesota.  You might remember that Minnesota was the site 

of the other really, really long election count.

      (Laughter)

      That was in 2008.  That election went on till June.  As they recounted absentee 

ballots.  The problem was when they were returned, they did something wrong on the 

envelope so those ballots weren't being counted because people were making clerical 

mistakes in how they packaged their ballot to ship it back.  Now, if you're absentee, you 

can't check it.  If you're an overseas voter or military overseas, if you happen to be in 

Florida on vacation, you shove it in the mail and hope for the best.  And they spent six 

months, 6 1/2 months, counting those ballots.  So seemed like a good thing to change.  

And they sent us what is in legal world called a markup.  So it's Òtrack changesÓ.  And 

really ugly, really hard to see what you're talking about.  And we said, yeah, we'd be 

happy to work on this, but we can't do it if we can't see did.  And so we began writing new 

instructions and doing new layouts, and to her eternal credit Beth Frazer from the 

Minnesota Secretary of State's office did not say, you guys are crazy, go away.  She dove 

in.  We did -- I think I counted up something like 100 iterations, flew back and forth.  We a 

team of people -- had a team of people in Washington State, in San Francisco, in Boston, 

few people in Ohio, who helped put this together, and we had plain language people, and 

it became the new instructions.  But the best thing that happened was that we did usability 

tests where we marshaled local volunteers to run that test.  Beth and her team decided 

they wanted a second test, and then they decided that they had learned how to run it 

themselves, and they ran that test having learned.  Because we made a kit of materials for 

them to help them learn.  It was a pretty simple task but it meant all of a sudden election 

officials began to think, yeah, we can do this.  We don't have to rush out an hire expensive 

professionals.  This is something we can do in the course of our work.

      The other thing we can do. We're doing the same thing in New York State. Instead 

of trying to argue about markup, Drew Davies from Oxide Design, one of the leaders of 

Design for Democracy,  created a markup of what the ballot might look like if we could just 

change the election laws.  And this amazing thing happened on a phone call with local 

county election officials.  They said -- WeÕve got to tell you we found this great set of 

designs on the web and we think we should be using them.  The Election Assistance 

Commission commissioned them.  We said, Yep, and we brought that designer in to work 

with us.

      So all of a sudden, that -- the volunteer work in Chicago led to a big paid project at 

the national level, a little bit of volunteer work, re-leveraged that.  So weaving in and out of 

pro-bono work and funded work lets us put together something thatÕs a lot bigger.

      (Applause).

This did not make it through last term because it was put in at the end of the session.  

We're hoping that it gave people time to get over their shock and this time it will go 

through, but who knows?

      And we can also remember that we're designing for all voters, not just for voters 

who happened to be able to read things on paper, not just for voters who happen to be 

able to get to the polls easily. But accessibility is part of election design and we have to 

remember that voters come in all shapes and sizes so even when we talk about people 

who are filling out things on paper, figuring out how high -- how to make places for them to 

write.  That kind design is also part of elections.


      Dana Chisnell who works on many projects with us says we can all be democracy 

super heroes.  What's been the real lesson of this is it doesn't take a huge amount of time.  

It takes being willing to engage with election officials where they are and how they want to 

meet us. 

      So if you want to get in touch, there are lots of things we can do.  I'm now working 

on a project for ITIF.  It's a funded grant for accessible voting technologies and I'm proud 

that in January we're going to open a challenge to open up the idea of what can we do 

that's different?  How can we use new technology?  How can we use better design to 

leverage into improving elections for everyone?  Thank you.

      

      (Applause)