[WEB4LIB] RE: The Bad Design Election

[Richard Wiggins]

The only good thing to come of this is the the wonderful lesson that user interface design classes and textbooks will use this for for years to come...

The New York Times had an interesting article quoting folks in the punch card election industry; this was indeed an interface design error even within their contraints.  You never put opposing candidates on opposite pages in butterfly formation.  See: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/10/politics/10MACH.html

I feel very, very sorry for the Palm Beach County elections supervisor.  She actually made this design choice to make the font size larger so the elderly could read the ballot better.  In so doing she made it much more confusing. Imagine making a user interface design error that changes the course of history!!! 

The broader lesson, I think, is that the punch card was never intended to be something that human beings directly "mark."  The states that use them like the fact that there is a paper object for each vote cast and they can be machine counted.  But one Florida county supervisor said that every time you run the cards through the count is different due to loose "chad" falling out. A voting machine (mechanical or electronic) can also easily be programmed to make it physically impossible for a voter to make an illegal choice.  

/rich

------Original Message------
From: "Robert J. Tiess" <rjtiess at warwick.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: November 10, 2000 8:39:08 PM GMT
Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: The Bad Design Election


At least if the candidates/options are displayed as
radio button input types, problems with "double-punched"
holes on virtual ballots would be totally eliminated ;-)

Robert

"GRAY, PAUL" wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jerry Kuntz [mailto:jkuntz at rcls.org]
> > Sent: Friday, November 10, 2000 10:48 AM
> > To: Multiple recipients of list
> > Subject: [WEB4LIB] The Bad Design Election
> >. . .
> > Should we feel fortunate that it would take some tortuous
> > HTML/CSS coding to
> > reproduce a web-based "butterfly" layout of alternately-aligned menu
> > options?
> 
> Yes
Richard Wiggins
Consulting, Writing & Training on Internet Topics
www.netfact.com/rww         wiggins at mail.com
517-349-6919 (home office)  517-353-4955 (work)  
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