NC State University News ServicesCampus Box 7504Raleigh, NC 27695-7504 [email protected]www.ncsu.edu/news
Media Contacts: Dr. Brad Mehlenbacher, 919/515-4105, 919/467-0485 or [email protected]Kevin Potter, NC State News Services, 919/515-3470 or [email protected]
Nov. 10, 2000
Palm Beach Ballots Flawed, Says NC State Document Design Researcher
A North Carolina State University information design researcher says the controversial Palm Beach County, Fla., presidential election ballot violates several well-researched principles of sound document design.
Dr. Brad Mehlenbacher explains that cognitive research on human and visual information processing indicates that when people are reading to do something -- to fill out a ballot, for example -- they immediately scan the document for the clearest organizational pattern. The more explicit the "scanning pattern," he says, the more effective and task-oriented a document is.
Mehlenbacher, NC State associate professor of English and adjunct associate professor of psychology, says Americans on Election Day entered the voting booth with a preconceived task of punching out or filling in a hole, and assumed they could quickly scan the ballot for cues to assist them in completing that task.
But, he says, Palm Beach County voters instead found typographical and visual cues indicating at least four dominant scanning patterns, rather than only one, telling them which hole they should select to vote for their candidate.
Graduate students in Mehlenbacher's "Online Information Design and Evaluation" class at NC State analyzed the Palm Beach County ballot on the night after the election. One student related that a friend in South Carolina mistakenly clicked "vote" in a computer-based ballot, thinking she was beginning a voting program. She then realized she instead had mistakenly voted for a candidate not of her choice. The poll director told her the vote was unretractable.
Mehlenbacher says situations like that could be prevented. "A good first step is to not simply trust that mailing samples to voters, or assuming they'll ask for help before they vote, is enough," he says. "Actually user-testing ballots in a simulated polling situation would have gone a long way toward identifying these user problems. Asking voters to pretend they are using the ballot after the fact, as some media outlets are doing, is also empirically problematic, as most Americans are already more familiar with the Palm Beach ballot than they probably are with the ones they completed on Tuesday in other counties and states."
Mehlenbacher, who has a doctoral degree in rhetoric and document design from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has published numerous articles on improving the "usability" of hardcopy and online information. He also serves on an organization called the Technical Communication Summit Group, a steering committee representing 11 international professional associations in technical communication and information design. The Summit Group expects to release a statement on the Palm Beach Ballot this weekend.
"Importantly, whether in hardcopy or online information design, users always surprise us," says Mehlenbacher, a long-time advocate of 'usability testing.' "It is not enough to have a few experts scan the document and imagine how actual readers will react. Time and again we see that, unless designers observe how documents and interfaces are used in context, they are rarely able to anticipate and correct all of the most serious design flaws."
Mehlenbacher says the controversy surrounding the Palm Beach County ballot is not the first time that poor design has led to what he says is often mislabeled "human error." In fact, researchers have demonstrated that poor information design can be costly to consumers, businesses and government in a variety of situations. At the same time, effective design and usability testing has led to huge time and monetary savings, he says.
Dr. Karen A. Schriver, a member with Mehlenbacher on the Summit Group and an internationally recognized expert in information design, outlines in her book Dynamics in Document Design 16 cases that demonstrate that "quality in document design pays." For example, the Department of Health and Social Security in the United Kingdom in 1984 spent $50,055 to develop and test a series of new forms for legal aid. The agency reports saving approximately $2,917,290 in staff time every year by using the plain-language forms.
Mehlenbacher says it is imperative that local, state, and federal governments start to take the principles and practices of usability testing more seriously, especially considering that some government officials predict that much of the voting process will be computerized by 2004.
More information about document design -- including ballot design -- is available at Mehlenbacher's Web site, www4.ncsu.edu/~brad_m/general.html.
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