I can relate to all those people who were confused by the so-called “butterfly” ballots in Florida’s Palm Beach County.
Why?
Because, after years of trying to understand the programming instructions for my VCR, the @#$%*&! machine is still blinking: “12:00,” “12:00,” “12:00,” “12:00.”
Everywhere, it seems, bad design and worse directions confound, from restaurant menus with teeny you-should-have-brought-a-magnifying-glass type to toy assembly instructions that are so bewildering that it’s easy to spend holidays figuring out Step 26B (though, to be honest, those of us who want to avoid the family are happy to have the excuse).
There are transit signs that fail to point us from the subway train to the bus. Airports without enough signs to make it easy to find to the nearest restroom. And, of course, those World Wide Web home pages that resemble the cockpit of a 747 — we feel like we need a pilot’s license to navigate them.
Confusion reigns — not clarity.
“There isn’t an information overload. There’s an explosion of non-information,” says Richard Saul Wurman of Newport, R.I., author of the 1990 best seller “Information Anxiety” and the chairman of an annual conference in Monterey, Calif., that brings together experts in the fields of graphics and technology.
“Most of the things we see are not information,” Wurman adds. “It’s not really information if I see it and it doesn’t inform.”
He tells how he rented a Cadillac at the San Francisco airport on his way to his conference one rainy night not too long ago. He wanted to know the usual stuff: how to operate the windshield wipers, how to open the trunk, what side of the car the gas tank was on and how to open it. So he got the booklet out of the glove compartment.
“The first 23 pages,” he says, “were the history of Cadillac.”
In other words, those botched Florida ballots are merely the tip of a nasty iceberg that’s floating around just about everywhere we go. And as the big hoo-ha over the presidential race shows, the consequences of confusion can be titanic.
Just ask officials at the Regional Transportation Authority, who are figuring out how to standardize the different-looking signs of their three transit arms — Metra’s commuter railroads, Pace’s suburban buses and the CTA’s buses and trains. The current mish-mash, they say, often confuses riders, especially those who use more than one part of the system. And that leads to longer travel times, a loss of ridership and more traffic jams on the roads because fewer people are taking public transit.
“People say, ‘This is too confusing. I’m going to take my car,’ ” says John DeLaurentiis, the agency’s deputy executive director for planning.
A commonly used term for the field that shapes the signs, symbols and blocks of type that give us our bearings in everything from airports to zoos is “graphic design.” But back in the 1970s, Wurman came up with another concept: “Information architecture.”
The idea, he says, was to bring the rigor associated with shaping buildings — where form is supposed to mesh with function — to the task of designing signs and other things that convey information. “The graphic design industry has tried to make things look good rather than be good,” he says.
He is hardly alone in that stinging critique, though others point the finger of blame at architects who don’t want signs to disturb the purity of their sleek palaces of steel and glass.
“Oftentimes, signage is an afterthought, an add-on,” says Sharon Poggenpohl, an associate professor of design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. “It isn’t thought about systematically. Everybody pays for it in frustration and anxiety.”
There are exceptions. America’s interstate highway system is a model of easily understood signage that is the same from the coast of Maine to the coast of California. And throughout the world, there is a universal language for pilots at airports — runway lights are white, taxiway lights are blue. Still, as demonstrated by the recent fatal crash of a Singapore Airlines jet whose pilot had steered it down the wrong runway, no system is fail-safe.
Indeed, in the view of many experts, every good design ought to take into account the inevitable: Something will go wrong.
“When you give good instructions to somebody, you assume that part of our lives is failure,” Wurman says. “If you’ve gone past the third gas station, you’ve gone too far.” He adds: “One of the problems down in Palm Beach was that people [recognized they] made a mistake and said, `We didn’t know what to do.'”
The irony about the Palm Beach County ballots is that they were designed to aid the failing eyes of the county’s many elderly voters. Officials made the names on the ballot larger than normal so older voters could see them more easily. But one page could not contain the names of 10 pairs of candidates for president and vice president.
So, in an arrangement that has become widely known as the “butterfly ballot,” the names were placed on facing pages with a single row of punch holes in between. Many voters became confused because Al Gore and Joe Lieberman’s names were second on the list of candidates on the left page. But the hole that needed to be punched for Gore and Lieberman was the third from the top.
“I’ll never use facing pages like that (again),” the ballot’s designer, Palm Beach County’s Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, told reporters.
Further confusing matters: The names of the candidates — and the arrows pointing to their punch holes — were arranged in a way that forced voters to cross back and forth between the left page and the right page as they eyed the names of George Bush (left), Pat Buchanan (right) and Al Gore (left). That defied the customary way of arranging candidates’ names — as a simple, top-to-bottom list.
Finally, because there was just one row of holes in the middle of the ballot — not two, as is sometimes the case — there wasn’t a clear separation between the left and right sides of the ballot. Midwesterners will understand the problem is similar to those tricky old three-lane roads in Wisconsin, where a center lane could be occupied by drivers going in either direction.
The combination of factors made LePore’s design backfire, causing widespread confusion and leading to the judicial battle that could decide the next president. A similar “butterfly ballot” arrangement befuddled Cook County voters choosing local judges.
“Her heart was in the right place. She was trying to give elderly people larger typography to address their visual deficit,” says IIT’s Poggenpohl. “But what she wasn’t aware of is that people (prefer) to read choices as lists. They like to read from top to bottom.”
The problem could easily have been avoided, Poggenpohl suggests, if Palm Beach County officials had tested out the new ballot on elderly voters — asking them to choose a candidate and then seeing if the hole they punched actually matched that choice. Computer software manufacturers typically conduct “user testing,” she explains, to understand whether the products they’re bringing to market will be easy to use — and, therefore, profitable.
But all too often, little thought is given to the person operating the computer, driving the car or moving through the airport.
When Chicago graphic designer Bart Crosby returned to the International Terminal at O’Hare after a recent trip to Munich and Madrid, for example, he passed through Customs and looked for an exit sign. He couldn’t find one.
Eventually, he managed to, but only because he was familiar with the airport and instinctively knew where to go. “In front of me,” he recalls, “was a very small woman shrouded in a black babushka. She was wandering aimlessly trying to find her way out.”
Sometimes, as in Las Vegas casinos, business owners purposely disorient the customer. The casinos are arranged in a mazelike fashion that blocks out views of the outside and discourages people from leaving slot machines and craps tables.
Overly long restaurant menus may serve the same function, Poggenpohl says.
Still, attempts are being made to make navigating the world a little bit less confusing. The RTA is developing coordinated transit signs for four sites — O’Hare and Midway airports, the Davis Street train station in Evanston and the CTA’s Cumberland Avenue train station. The signs, which will be used on a demonstration basis, are scheduled to be in place by June 2001.
Some experts suggest it would be wise to extend the concept of coordinated graphic design to the voting booth, especially because Americans move so frequently. That way, the learning curve for those entering the ballot box will be less steep — and the chances for the sort of turmoil we’re experiencing now will be greatly reduced.
“It seems to me very odd that there is not some universal system for voting,” says Poggenpohl. “Some people use machines. Some use punch cards. Some places even use paper ballots. This is a critical enough civic issue that it merits careful study so that as people move from state to state, they should have confidence and comfort when they enter the voting booth.”
