If you haven't been aware of it, there's been a problem with the voting machines we use in Texas, and it's a great illustration about what happens when people fundamentally misunderstand the role and importance of design.
You may have seen reports in the news that some of the voting machines used in Texas have been switching votes. It doesn't appear to be malicious—that is, the machines aren't being hacked—but rather a problem with the design of the interface. I'll let this article explain it:
Here's the problem, in a nutshell:
But if voters touch the interface while the page is still loading, or use the clickwheel and button at the same time, it can change their ballots without the user realizing it — especially if they’ve picked a one-button straight Democratic or Republican ticket, since it takes several seconds for the machine to check the boxes for each race.
I want to draw your attention to one quote in particular:
The Secretary of State’s office has admonished voters to fill out their ballots slowly, emphasizing that “the voting machines are not malfunctioning” and that the issue was purely “user error.” [emphasis mine]
In the course of practicing design, I hear the term "user error" frequently, and I am always extremely wary when I do. Situations like this are rarely true user error and are often the result of lazy, bad, or negligent design. Such is the case here. It is true that the device is not malfunctioning, but its normal operating condition is poorly designed and allows for errors of this kind to occur. Shifting the blame onto the user is an unacceptable cop-out.
If there's a delay in updating the ballot selections because of the limitations of the hardware and software, then at minimum the design of the software should prevent the user from making any changes to their selection during the process of updating them. Instead, the design allows this interaction to happen, so the fault here is on the design of the hardware and software (and, to some degree, on the government for blaming users instead of poor design).
Ian Fleming, in the James Bond novel Goldfinger, wrote: "Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action." The same is kind of true in design. If you're seeing a pattern in the way people "misuse" your product/service/space, it means that the way people expect the thing to work and the way it actually works are at odds with one-another, and that's a design problem—one that's especially bad when the collision between those two is easy to miss but has big consequences—and not user error. The field I work in, healthcare, is particularly guilty of this given the complexities of a lot of the devices, products, and services we deal with.
This is also a good time to remind you that, if you're eligible, you should go vote... carefully.
Great design resource
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter)
Submitted October 31, 2018 at 07:20PM by lukipedia https://ift.tt/2zieyCP
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