One more shot at Blogspotting…
I haven’t been here in a while. Blogger is looking a little refreshed. I have to say I like and dislike the new interface. While it seems minimalistic and easy to use, I have been encountered with errors from the outset of my current endeavor. 2 of 5 stars on the “red4tr400 Usability Scale.”
Anyway, let’s not talk about me today, and perhaps also in the future. I’m not going to make this commentary public until I really get into the swing of things, which will hopefully be in a few weeks. My vision for this commentary is to create a forum for me to discuss topics relating to the Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Usability, Philosophy, Robotics, and perhaps some other related topics. I will attempt to leave the mundane aspects of these sciences for the researchers to figure out, and instead will tackle the everyday applications of the topics I discuss. Basically, I’ve got stuff on my mind, and want a place to dump everything I’m thinking, and at the same time get a little practice at writing for fun. Let’s get to it…
Electronic Voting:
If you haven’t heard or read about the Diebold voting machines, start here. I was hearing a lot about this last week on San Diego’s NPR Station and thoughts relating to usability came to mind. I would like to point out that none of the complaints about these voting machines have anything to do with the interface. In fact, one reporter claimed that many people reported a better voting experience than ever before. Apparently a lot of attention was paid to the interface on these machines. This is great news, especially after the bruhaha that was the 2000 presidential election. Hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and other such error prone pieces of voting technology will soon be a thing of the past.
Like it or not, electronic voting is the future. I would like to submit my votes via e-mail. It’s not that I’m lazy, I’m willing to go to my local polling place, but voting online would be extremely convenient, and would perhaps incite others to get off their lazy, apathetic, or forgetful butts and take part in a big piece of what it means to be an American. Truth be told, we’re a long way from e-mail voting, but computerized voting is good enough for now. I commend Diebold for their hard work in creating a usable interface for voting. It was a priority that deserved to be at the top of the list.
However, after getting the user interface right, Diebold managed to completely nullify the good qualities of the machines. It turns out that sometimes the meat of the software is more important than how it looks. While I firmly believe that good software can only be considered high quality if it has a usable interface, I do not believe the inverse is true. That is, a usable interface does not mean the software is high quality. For example, compare this Slashdot to this Slashdot . If you can’t immediately tell, the former is real and the latter is fake. At first glance these are both high quality and interactive web sites, but when you delve deeper you realize that only one of these sites is the real deal. The actual quality of the material on the real Slashdot may be doubted by some, but this is not the issue I wish to discuss.
My point is that Diebold created horrible (but usable) software, and passed it off as a high quality tool. Shame on Diebold for making the User Interface Designers of the world look bad. Shame on them too for fooling voters into thinking the system was secure. Diebold should have realized that kinks in the system are not allowable when it comes to electronic voting machines. The system should have been perfected before it was released. A delayed release date beats a horrendously flawed system any day of the week, especially in the case of voting machines. Now this company is done, fini. Good riddance, Diebold. Your system tricked people into thinking it was completely usable. How do we expect people to trust our computer systems when companies with ethics like this are still in business? Diebold, your system is a traveshamockery.
Next time: GMail