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Butterfly Ballot Causes Performance Problems

© Audrey Choden

You don't have to be an American citizen to know about the butterfly ballot debacle that occurred during the recent presidential election in Palm Beach County, Florida. Thousands of people mistakenly voted for the wrong candidate because the ballot confused them.

You're probably wondering what this has to do with training and development. The same information design issues related to the butterfly ballot also apply to online courses and performance support tools. Farfetched? Read on.

Information design

Information design is the process of organizing information for print and electronic media in order to facilitate knowledge and understanding. In an interview published in Feed, an online magazine, some experts in the information design field discussed the butterfly ballot. These experts included Jakob Nielsen, author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, and Don Norman, a principal of Nielsen Norman Group (a division of UNext.com, a distance education company) and President of Learning Systems. Norman is also the author of The Psychology of Everyday Things, Things That Make Us Smart.

According to Don Norman, "There are several problems with the butterfly ballot. One is it clearly wasn't user-tested. But in fact, it's not easy to user-test, because the error rate is like one percent. And so you're going to have to make sure you test 500 people in order to make sure you've really tested it. Second, you've got to be careful how you test it. The election people said: Well, we showed it to all parties and they all said it was okay. But you can't just show the ballot, you have to show it in context, inside the voting booth."

Norman added, "And finally, you have to look in context at how a person uses it...It's not like a menu -- I go and I read it and I study it and I think about it and try to evaluate which candidate I want. Instead, I go in already knowing which candidate I want. You look for Bush, and it's the first name on the ballot and you punch the first hole. You go in for Gore, and it's the second name on the ballot so you punch the second hole. You go in for Buchanan; you look on the left and it's not there, so you look at the right -- oh, there it is, you see Buchanan and you punch the hole. But if I'm a Gore voter, then oops, the second hole which I punched for Gore is actually Buchanan. And I never even saw the name on the right."

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