Wednesday, June 30, 2004
ICT in local communities
Will Davies will be launching his final report for iSociety at The Work Foundation at the end of July. The launch debate panelists for Shrinking the Net: the delivery of ICT in local communities, include Bill Thompson, Stephen Coleman, Matt Locke and Chris Yap, as well as Will himself.
Will's post
10:10 PM|
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Usability in the South West
Chris McEvoy and Neil Suffield have set up an informal grouping of usability professionals in the Bristol/Bath area of the UK, known as SWUG. Chris tells me that cider will be one item on the agenda - it must be a West Country thing....
1:16 PM|
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Lies, the Evening Standard, and opaque election statistics
A recent Evening Standard (London) headline asserted, "500,000 votes not counted" in the London elections for mayor and London assembly. A bold statement, as there are only 5,197,647 people eligible to voted in London, and only 1,920,533 did so, implying that a high percentage of votes cast were invalid. So I decided to investigate.
Statistics for London elections indicate that marks on cast ballots are classified in a rather curious way. The statistical breakdown provided by London Elects for the 2000 elections, for example, breaks down votes rejected in the mayoral election into
- multiple votes
- uncertain or blank
- no valid first choice
- voter ID discernible
each then in turn broken down by whether the vote was cast for a first choice or second choice candidate.
That year, almost 25,000 electors invalidly cast votes for two candidates in the same column (rather than in two columns), the 'multiple vote' problem.
What's most curious, however, is the category 'uncertain or blank', amounting to 304,686 rejected votes in 2000. This category includes both cases where there is a valid undervote - that is, the voter casts a vote for first choice but finds nobody appealing among the second choices - AND invalid votes (for either first or second choices), such as cases of unclear marks, voting for the same candidate for both choices and so on.
The vast majority of this figure is made up of second choices. So what are we to think? Maybe many voters validly didn't vote for a second choice. Maybe lots of confused people invalidly voted for the same candidate twice (something the ballot paper does not advise against). Maybe there was a contingent who drew cartoons in the second choice column to while away the time. We just don't know how many of these so-called 'rejected votes' were in fact valid, and how many were invalid.
Considering that these so-called 'uncertain or blank' rejected votes amounted to some 82% of all rejected votes in 2000, representing more than 8.6% of all votes cast in the mayoral election, would it not make sense to distinguish valid undervotes (blank) from known invalid votes?
According to London Elects, the stastical categories are exactly the same for 2004, hence the Standard's headline. I'm assured by the press office that some are pushing for a better statistical breakdown, though no assurances are being provided that this will happen.
Voting is a secret process in a democracy, so it's difficult to find realistic, large-scale data on voter behaviour that is useful to the design process. Useful information, such as distinguishing how many (invalidly) voted for the same candidate twice, how many in some way spoilt the second choice column, and how many didn't vote for a second choice at all, would help those designing ballots in future. Without this kind of data, it's next to impossible to know what went on.
11:20 AM|
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Personal knowledgement management
Link from David Wilcox over at Designing for Civil Society to PKM about personal knowledge management.
As someone who regularly ponders what exactly my electronic and paper categories should be, and how these tie in to my habits/work context, and who then has a go to see if I find the new ones work, before having yet another attempt at creating electronic contacts info, timely assistance indeed.
Perhaps one of the reasons why Norman's Things That Make Us Smart is one of my favourites is that he addresses the whole issue of memory 'in the world' and individuals' office environments.
1:08 PM|
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Friday, June 25, 2004
Titles
I love the title of Simon Davies's talk at an LSE workshop - on e-Government - earlier this year: "Giving Guns to Psychopaths: the Case Against Joined-up Government".
A range of materials from the workshop is now available on the website.
11:04 AM|
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Sunday, June 20, 2004
Top ten must reads on voting and usability
Whitney Quesenbery has just posted this list of top ten reads concerning voting and usability, on the main UPA website. This should be where you being if you're new to the topic.
2:01 PM|
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Report from UPA in Minneapolis
Some good things came out of the Minneapolis sessions on voting and usability.
First, there was a really good cross-section of disciplines and interest groups taking part in the workshop, which contributed to providing a good aerial view of what's going on.
Those taking part included Sharon Laskowski from the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and Bill Killam, both authors of the report on Voting Usability Standards presented ealier this year to the US Congress (to which Sharon also gave evidence).
Chicago-based (and AIGA offshoot) Design For Democracy was also well-represented,with both Dori Tunstall and Cheyenne Medina present, who have been doing great things in this field, and brough with them plenty of project materials for us to ponder over.
On the academic front, both Richard Niemi and Michael Traugott from the National Science Foundation-funded project on voting technology and ballot design. Niemi is a political scientist and Traugott from communication studies. We were also lucky to have usability and information design old hand - and conference keynote speaker - Ginny Redish on board, who takes a personal interest in this field.
The other co-organisers included UPA president Whitney Quesenbery, just this week appointed to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee advising the US Electoral Assistance Commission, and UPA member Josie Scott, who has extensive experience as an elections offical in Michigan (as well as being a usability professional). And to round things off nicely, we even had a vendor representative. In fact, more than half the workshop participants were non-UPA people, showing that usability issues are of concern to professionals from a range of disciplines.
Second, there were seeral highly worthwhile outputs from the sessions. These included the launch of a project to gather sample ballots from around the US (and perhaps around the world, if we get more ambitious), the first steps in drawing up a strategy of usability testing voting systems, and a decision to produce literature for usability profesionals about voting.
Perhaps the most fun of the day was when we took a Michigan ballot supplied by Josie and redesigned it - I reckon we collectively came up with more than 60 changes in little more than an hour. It wasn't that the ballot was particularly bad: it's just that pretty much any ballot design uniformed by usability may leave the voter confused.
Many of those taking part in the workshop also participated in panel session later in the week, which provided a crash course in issues and trends, and which drew in more volunteers for the UPA's Voting & Usability Project.
All in all, a very worthwhile week, though as always there were mant issues thrown up.
For example, how can designers redesign for usability when so may design questions are laid down by law? This is true both in the US and UK, and probably around the world. Design for Democracy has had some success in this area, which has parallels with the issue of information design for medicines.
Does every country need a Palm Beach County before it will take usability of voting seriously? It seems to me that usability in this context has yet to be taken on board anywhere outside the US. Professionals in this field in the US are concerned about the lack of funds forthcoming for usability work (in contrast to the seemingly plentiful funding for purchasing voting and optical scanning machines), but I have to admit they are a long way ahead of the UK in terms of government, citizen and professional awareness.
Voting really is mission critical, and requires systems (in their widest sense) to be used by just about everybody, using a different design on many occasions, with vital information not available to designers until almost the last moment, and with no feedback to the system's users. It's more than likely that a proportion of voters having been marking ballots in an invalid way for decades - but how would they know? Unless we can compare voter intention with voting result, we - and they - will remain in the dark about the extent of the problem.
NIST report on voting usability standards:
http://www.eac.gov/ (link at the right of the page)
Design for Democracy case studies: http://www.electiondesign.org/case.html
12:58 PM|
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Friday, June 04, 2004
Voting made complicated
Catherine Bennett takes a look at the London voting literature in The Guardian.
10:36 AM|
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Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Necessary online transactions?
This week's eGov Monitor reports that local authorities are behind the game in offering online transaction serices. "Provision of transactional services, particularly those relating to application submissions, are also seen to require considerable improvement."
Given my most recent transactional experience, I'd rather that the public sector offered fewer transactions that actually worked as intended. As I'm not going to be here on election day, and as experiment to find out more about the process, I decided to register for a postal vote. This required clicking through eight pages, and filling out personal information, in order to get a personalised form....which I then had to post to my local authority.
Except after I'd entered all my data and moved to the final screen, I found that the link provided to download the personalised document didn't work. My document had disappeared into the wild web. I then backed up eight pages - great thing, the back button - to find that elsewhere I could download a non-personalised form to similarly post in.
I probably won't get the postal vote anyway: it seems that postal votes may not be sent out until just four days before election day - according to the Electoral Commission website - by which time I won't be here, and the ballot has to be returned by election day (so send and posting from overseas is not feasible). I though postal voting was about making things more convenient, but frankly I'm not convinced, if this is the experience for the postal voter. The housebound voter may well benefit - although a form needs to be signed by someone else, so the single housebound need not apply - but the voter temporarily away from home will not.
With the process so limited, is it even worth creating a personalised online transaction? If we are to have postal voting - and there are issues concerning security - it seems to me to make more sense to invest time in rethinking the process that is presented to the voter.
4:35 PM|
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eBay
An interesting BBC Radio 4 programme about eBay this week, which went into much more detail that the usual media coverage.
Check out this and other BBC recordings indexed on Chris McEvoy's UsabilityViews website. Chris tells me he now has more than 172 hours of recorded material indexed.
4:00 PM|
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Fieldwork and synthesis
I'm doing commercial fieldwork at the moment, and shall be speaking on 'Why do fieldwork?' at a business-focused (rather than academic) conference in Minneapolis next week. So my mind is fairly concentrated on the subject.
One of the questions raised by the Minneapolis organisers is 'how much can you rely on other people's studies?' Good question, and it's linked to the issue of doing team fieldwork and then bringing the results together, and then reporting them to the client.
Perhaps the analysis and synthesis process - in the area of rapid ethnography/commercial projects - is the area where we need to focus effort to develop useful yet cogent material for clients.
Traditional anthropological reports from the field are extensive texts, pieces of careful writing providing an account of an experience. These are all well and good within the academic context, but don't work within the business world. In business, information representation is almost the antithesis of the ethnographic report, with much summarised data, preferably representated in visuals. Anthropologists, however, are rarely 'visual people'. We need to extend the repertoire of visual tools for representing ethnographic research.
3:54 PM|
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E-voting standards
The NIST report (US) on an approach to e-voting standards has been published, under the auspices of the Electoral Assitance Commission. It could perhaps serve as guidance for people in other jurisdictions considering e-voting standards (there are virtually none anywhere in the world, as far as I can glean). There's good coverage of the current state of standards, and the issue of guidelines versus standards, and how/why they should differ.
Thanks to Whitney Quesenbery for keeping her eye on these developments.
3:49 PM|
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