A transcript of Episode 193 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Dana Chisnell talk about democracy as a design problem and how that impacts both registration and participation.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Lizzie Hedges.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 193.
Per Axbom
This is UX Podcast. I am Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
And I’m James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
Balancing business technology and people every other Friday from Stockholm Sweden, with listeners in 177 countries from Hungary to Romania.
James Royal-Lawson
Now Per and I, we’re recording this the morning directly after our general election here in Sweden, which makes today’s topic and and guest really very topical and and relevant. Dana Chisnell is an expert in civic design. She’s done work for the National Institute of Standards and Technology into amongst other things, the language and standards of ballot instructions. She’s also worked with testing poll worker documentation for the voluntary voting system guidelines.
Per Axbom
And Dana also teaches design and government at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. And last year polished off a two year stint as a generalist problem solver for the United States Digital Service and the Obama White House doing user research and civic design across agencies.
James Royal-Lawson
So at From Business to Buttons, we talked to Dana about the complexities of democracy when it comes to the vast number of different designs of the actual process of voting.
I’ve realised I’ve actually learned quite a lot already from you today.
Dana Chisnell
Well, that’s excellent.
James Royal-Lawson
I have realised that I had some misunderstandings about America, or some things maybe I’d forgotten. But I still wrote down in my notes, America is so broken.
Sorry to all the American listeners out there. But it was fascinating to learn more about the democratic process, the voting process in the US. Can you tell us a little bit…there was Bill was a character used in a story
Dana Chisnell
Bill was a real person who we met as part of a study that we were doing in California about the challenges that people face who are on the low end of civic engagement and propensity to vote. And Bill was in an adult reading programme as part of the public library system in California and he was one of the people who we met in Berkeley. Super charming guy, came in all sunlight and and charm and sat down as one of the participants for testing this prototype voter guide that we had, and told me right away that he had trouble reading, that he was just learning and that he didn’t know anything about voting because he’d been incarcerated. And I think he thought at that moment that he was disqualified from voting.
James Royal-Lawson
I thought that, I think we both thought
Per Axbom
That was my guess, yeah
Dana Chisnell
Yeah. And that is not unusual in the US. In some states that would be true if you had committed a felony and done time in prison you might never get your voting rights restored. But in California, where Bill lived after he did his time he completed a sentence all he had to do is register to vote again. But he didn’t know that.
James Royal-Lawson
All he had to do! Sorry, giving the game away.
Dana Chisnell
Good point, but he didn’t even know that until he read our prototype, Plain Language Voter Bill of Rights, where he saw that he had a right to vote, even though he had committed a felony and done time in prison, and so he was super excited about that. And that gave him all kinds of energy for going through the usability tests that we were doing. We had a really wonderful session, we got amazing feedback because of his low literacy. We learned a tonne about what was really helpful to him and what was not. When we finished up the session, he got to register to vote while you’re still at the library
James Royal-Lawson
You helped him to register?
Dana Chisnell
He was super excited. Actually, my we did this project in partnership with the League of Women Voters which actually takes people of all genders but it started as a suffragist organisation in the early 1900s. And they have just kept the name the League of Women Voters so our partners were there with us. And one of our partners just brought Bill over to her laptop, there was free Wi Fi in the library, pulled up the state of California website, got him signed up. And in two minutes he was registered to vote
James Royal-Lawson
And I saw that you showed a picture of the voting form as well, for several voting forms, but in fact all the information you shared from the American elections was incredible. The language and the amount text and the amount pages.
Per Axbom
Is it especially broken in the US or is I mean, it seemed like you’ve looked at different countries
Dana Chisnell
Yeah, I have spent some time and my team my team has over the years come from different countries as well. And so yeah, we have had some experience with that. Voting in America is different because the system of governance is different, our flavour of democracy is very direct. So there are many more offices to elect people to. And there are many more opportunities for the general voting population to vote on whether particular things should become law. And it’s more in some places and less in other places.
The example that I showed from San Francisco from the 2016 election had 40 questions on it between the county and the state. This is extreme, but not unusual these days. As the flavour of state legislatures change, up and down on the political scale, more or fewer questions may show up on the ballot. But also in a place like California, and this is true and a few other western states, there is something called a voter initiative. So people who are registered voters can put out a petition and get signatures to have a question put on the ballot, that would become law. If it’s past
James Royal-Lawson
That’s quite correct, I guess from a democratic point of view to have all these electable positions, and all these questions, it’s very direct democracy
Per Axbom
In theory
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah absolutely in theory, but we something that we’re aware of, at least in Europe is the low voter turnout, in the US, it’s something that’s always painted as well. You know like only a third of Americans vote or have the right to vote and so on, there’s all these low numbers they keep, I’m almost certainly getting them wrong now, but there’s all these low numbers compared to European elections that we are taught or we’re fed by the media. And that was another aspect of what I’ve learned from you today as well about how that figure is is probably not necessarily. It’s not saying what I thought it was saying.
Dana Chisnell
What did you think it was saying?
James Royal-Lawson
Because the accessibility, because when you showed us the journey maps or the the process owner and and the complications of voting, not only the complications with the form, but the whole process, it made me realise that voter turnout wasn’t what I thought it was.
Per Axbom
It was unexpected then?
James Royal-Lawson
Well I had another…I couldn’t just blame lazy Americans for not getting out, for example,
Dana Chisnell
Right, because there are all these hurdles that you have to get over before you can even get to the to having a ballot in your hands. There are a lot of decisions to make to. So one of the ways that we try to make it easier for people to get a ballot and cast is through something that by election geeks is called convenience voting. So in European countries it’s called advanced voting so you can get a ballot ahead of election day and cast it early, you might do that by mail or you might do that physically in person at a place that’s set up to, to be kind of a polling place.
But again, this is the thing that’s not uniform across the state. So the rules are different. So if you have moved from California to New York, for example, the rules around early voting are entirely different. And so it’s on the voter to learn, is there even early voting? If there is where is it being held? What are the hours? What are the days? Those are all decisions that you have to make right and if you don’t make an actual plan to say I’m going to vote on Saturday at 2pm in the afternoon after my kids soccer practice it doesn’t get done, because there’s so many things to have to remember to learn and make decisions about and then to go and do.
Some states have solved some of this problem by allowing all vote by mail. So for example, in Oregon was the first but Washington has followed in Colorado as well. And now some counties in California just send a ballot to every single registered voter ahead of every election. And voters have the options then of mailing their marked ballot back or putting it in a an official drop box or taking it to a polling place on election day. So that removes a lot of obstacles and the decisions that you have to make. And drop boxes are located in high traffic areas like at libraries, or at transit points where people would be switching buses for example, or switching from the subway to bus.
And, and all of that is very carefully planned out about where those things go. But in other states, like Virginia, there isn’t early voting, there’s this thing. This is my favourite all time thing about elections, they allow a thing called in-person absentee voting
James Royal-Lawson
That sounds very curious.
Dana Chisnell
So there is an old legal practice that you can vote absentee, which is basically voting by mail. But the absentee part is that you are absent from the place where you would vote on the day of the election. So you can apply, the intention originally on this was that you can apply for a ballot that would be sent to you and then you mark it and you put in a special envelope and you send it back. But with in-person absentee, you can just go to your clerk’s office or your registrar’s office and fill out a form applying for an absentee ballot and vote it while you are there. So this is the in-person absentee part.
But you have to have an excuse. You must have a reason and there are 19, I think there are 19 legally sanctioned reasons in Virginia that you would be allowed to vote
Per Axbom
Because yeah, yeah, you have to fill them to form and apply.
Dana Chisnell
Right? That’s right. So you see this continuum.
James Royal-Lawson
So yeah, another hurdle to cross, to deal with, if you actually register to vote.
Dana Chisnell
That’s right.
Per Axbom
So what you found in your research is that there is this expected journey or path that voters, most voters you think, follow. And you found that well, that’s not necessarily true. A lot of voters follow a completely different path, perhaps some of the same stops, but in a different direction.
Dana Chisnell
That’s right. And this is not that uncommon, right? If you work with large organisations, the organisation has one model of what the process should be, and their users or customers or members, or patients have a very different point of view about what that process is. These are different mental models.
James Royal-Lawson
And it’s always a percentage game. I mean, he’s never 100 per cent that follow it anyway
Dana Chisnell
It’s extremely rare, yeah. And so that is basically what we found with voting and elections based on the research that we did. And when we present this stuff to people who administer elections, they recognise the institutional process that we identified right away like this is very familiar to them. It is mostly calendar driven because there are a lot of legal deadlines that open up certain periods and close certain periods. And there’s a sequence that they just always follow. And the assumption until we did this work was that voters follow this also. But what we saw was that that is not the case that voters come at this in a much different orientation. And that really starts with, why are we holding this election? What actually is happening? What’s on the ballot that I need to know about, that I might feel like investing my time and energy in diving into this whole process. And all the other decisions fall from that.
Per Axbom
So you had a quote, which I’m not getting right now, but it was along the lines like the map is not a solution. It’s a snapshot of our current understanding, which I mean, that’s true of every journey map we ever make, but it’s not something we talk about.
Dana Chisnell
No, it’s that’s right. And I think I have worked in organisations where somebody has said, let’s make a journey map and that is like a product of the design team. But that’s not the reason for doing it. The reason for doing it is, well, there are a lot of reasons for doing it. Our reasons for doing it, were to understand what we thought we knew about the process. Figure out kind of where the gaps were in our knowledge and understanding of the process not just between election administrators and voters, but for voters. Some of some parts of the journey that I laid out today for the privilege voter and for the burden voter, our data is a little bit thin. So over the next few years, we will be doing more work in those particular areas.
But it gives us a tool, you know, it’s a boundary object. It gives us a tool for saying this is what we know right now. What will be different in a year or in three years based on the work that we’re doing? And can we fill in the gaps? Or do things move around? Not only because we learn more about what the experience is like, but because the laws change or the culture changes, or the political landscape changes. And so while I’ve been presenting this particular journey for a year, year and a half, something like that, I expect in a couple more years, it will look quite different.
Per Axbom
I’d hope that as designers, well I certainly notice that as I get older that I realised a lot of the artefacts I produce they’re just wrong. And you have to recognise that you just have to figure out
Dana Chisnell
Did you just do a crappy job Per?
Per Axbom
I know, I know it’s wrong, or I have to assume that it’s wrong. I just have to fight to get it the least amount of wrong and that’s what I’m doing. I’m always trying to make it less wrong
James Royal-Lawson
Or fight to make sure you get a chance to do the second version. Because too often that first guess is a first guess. And it’s part of your learning process
Dana Chisnell
Well, Jared school and I are teaching a workshop tomorrow on deconstructing delight. And one of the things that we will have everybody do is make journey maps based on just their assumptions to start with, and then and then we’ll go from there. You’ve got to start somewhere. And as long as you don’t, as long as you look at the assumptions as a baseline for doing the work of understanding what the experience really is, then you’re probably in good shape
Per Axbom
Because the power of the artefact is that it’s a conversation starter. So we can talk about it. It’s not true, but we can talk about it because it’s easier to point at something.
Dana Chisnell
That’s right. Yes. It’s a tool for shared understanding.
Per Axbom
And the other very important insight, of course that you had was contrary to James’ belief that there is no voter apathy?
Dana Chisnell
Uh huh. Oh, yeah. This is controversial.
Per Axbom
Yes. So you’re saying that people really do want to vote they try really hard. And Bill was a great example of that. But there are just too many obstacles.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and the difficulty of each step.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And then there’s the what I tend to call the ego depletion, you have, you have a set amount of energy that you can be expected to exert on a given task. And then the more obstacles you encounter, the less effort you can actually put into the next level.
Dana Chisnell
Each person has a finite pool of resources to expand on this and
Per Axbom
And it’s not even only about, I was thinking today actually, weather is great. A lot of the obstacles I’ve encountered today are I don’t mind them at all because I’m happy anyway because of the weather. So there are other obstacles of course in our environments,
Dana Chisnell
Yes. That’s that’s a good example actually, weather plays a part in all kinds of things, including showing up for an election. If the weather is terrible, you might not show up. If the weather is great, you might not show up. So what you want is just sort of mediocre, normal weather.
Per Axbom
And that’s why we will all build the dome cities in the future to ensure voters show up
Dana Chisnell
Temperate, not interesting weather. Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
But they do care, what did you say about, what is it that drives them to vote?
Dana Chisnell
Usually, in our research, what we hear is a couple of factors drive people to vote. One is simple habit. They were brought up in a household where this voting was not a question and being engaged in their community. was just part of their lives. And those habits can be built. But the other reason that people often take part and why you see across elections in the United States, big bumps in participation for some elections, for example in 2008, we had a black guy running for president for the first time. And that was kind of a big deal.
So people really turned out and it wasn’t just that he was a black guy. It was that he held policy positions that people believed would make their lives better. For example, I know you guys live in a civilised country, but in the United States, we don’t have national health care. We don’t have socialised medicine. So people have to buy insurance and they were around 40 million people who had no insurance whatsoever in 2008. And so the idea that this man could be elected to office, and that people would have good, affordable health care was a huge motivator for a lot of people to turn out to vote who had not ever voted before in some cases, even though they were grown adults who’ve been eligible for a long time. So we see bumps like that, and what that really is, we think, even at the local level is there are issues on the platform, in the discussion that touched people directly, they are feeling some kind of a pain that they think will be addressed by that candidate or by that question, and that is when those folks get motivated.
But if there’s not as passionate, very deeply held set of issues, sometimes those folks are less likely to show up. And then if you are another country that would like the outcome of the US election to turn out a particular way, you might target people on social media who are in that kind of vulnerable spot. And it’s easy to pick up the data also, for example, you can know who voted and who did not vote in the last presidential election. This is purchasable data in the United States. So it’s also easy for a variety of reasons, like you have a revenue model of advertising, to target individual users of social media and to send them messages that will either try to change their minds or maybe just exhaust them to the point where they’ll stay home.
Per Axbom
Right.
Dana Chisnell
And that happened to a lot of people, we think
Per Axbom
That’s a good example because you are either exhausting people or you’re providing them with the energy to actually go out and do something.
James Royal-Lawson
So what we’re saying here though, is that democracy is a design problem on at least two fronts. That the the actual process for voting for registering, knowledge collection to do with voting, registering and then actually voting is complicated. Reading edge, you need to understand the material is way off the scale compared to what’s required. But then on the opposite end, we’ve got various services, like you say that sell advertising advertising based models that are eating away from that direction and targeting you individually to push you one way or the other. So it’s a pincer attack.
Per Axbom
Yeah, you have to fight it from two directions.
Dana Chisnell
Right. So even if none of the social media scenario had played out at all There’s still all these hurdles for people to get through in many places in the United States, and then when you add that level of having to split the signal from the noise that’s often more challenging than people can deal with, and they just opt out.
Per Axbom
Well, I’ve certainly learned a lot today.
James Royal-Lawson
Definitely. I mean, it’s one thing saying that we should make forms more usable, more easy to read, and, and so on. But how can we as designers help democracy?
Dana Chisnell
So there are a bunch of different ways, in the US especially but in other countries as well. The people who work in polling places are often not government employees, but who are temporary workers who are volunteers. You get paid but it’s not very much. It’s a long day. You have to take training to do the thing. But then this sounds pretty much like the jobs we all have already. So you know. So volunteering to work the polls would be amazing, actually, to have all the UX people on the planet during that. For one thing, the average age of poll workers in the United States and Canada and I heard today in Sweden too is late 60s, early 70s. So people who are in the UX practice generally would bring that age average down quite a bit. Not there’s anything wrong with being in your late 60s or 70s. But bringing some new energy to that space would be awesome.
But my reason really is, this is the most interesting fieldwork you will ever do. It’s so fascinating to see the range of people who take part in the civic process. We really encourage people to try to do that kind of work. Many municipal election administrators are actually looking for help and can’t really afford very much help. And so there may be design work that you could volunteer to help with. If you come in with the right attitude of just offering open services, not going in saying, I know how to do your job better than you do, but to say, is there anything I can do to make your work easier, I have these skills. You will often be invited in. And you can also get some practice that way working on some things that you might not get to. So there are those those couple of things.
But there are two other bits that we’ve learned about over the last few years. One is this idea of voting party in the US and the example that I gave about the San Francisco Valley, you’d have a dinner party where you invite your neighbours and friends. And you’d split up the questions on the ballot and each person would do homework on each thing. And then you would come have a dinner party again, maybe multiple, where people came back and reported out the homework that they had done in a non partisan, objective way, so that each person can focus on a particular candidate or party or question. Those are fun and, you know, you get to know your neighbours. And that can be really fruitful.
James Royal-Lawson
I imagine that’s a good solution for privileged voters. But I guess it’s a bit more of a struggle for the burdened voters.
Dana Chisnell
Well, there are almost always in communities where the are burden voters, sort of trusted community leaders, you know, that that person who everyone calls aunty, you know, but she’s not necessarily related to everyone. And if that person set up a an interaction like that maybe as a community meeting or potluck. You could get some really awesome stuff done. So there’s that. But the main thing is you need to have a plan. And so little clusters of UX people in their communities could create little flyers with checklists and make their own plans for voting to say, I’m going to vote on this day at this time in this way. And this is what I need to do that and distribute those little checklists, but more importantly, make a plan for yourself and help somebody else make a plan and make sure that they get a ballot in their hands and that they get to vote.
James Royal-Lawson
That’s really good. We’re gonna have to do an election template for this September.
Per Axbom
Definitely, yes, that’ll be really good. I love the the concreteness of these suggestions because sometimes I get invited to like these 24 hour brainstorming camps, how do we solve the problems of the world and you sit inside brainstorming? And it’s really stupid, isn’t it? Just volunteering at a polling station? You can’t get more concrete than that. And that’s how you learn stuff. Yeah. And as you say, go in with an open mind. Without prejudice. Thank you so much for sitting down with us Dana,
Dana Chisnell
Thank you very much for having me. It was fun.
Per Axbom
So I did laugh, James when you said that America is so broken. And just now last night, we’re coming out of the Swedish general election, how do you feel about Sweden then? How broken are we?
James Royal-Lawson
Oh yeah, it’s so fascinating to have been able to, listen back to the interview, just before our general election and then go through our voting process yesterday. And you know, contrast those two worlds of the American democratic system and the challenges it’s facing and our democratic system and the challenges we face. And I think, you know, I’ve reflected so much and learned so much about this that, you know, voter turnout in the US. Now, I think last time was 56% of those that are eligible to have the right to vote. Whereas here in Sweden, what we are on, we’re on like, mid 80s.
Per Axbom
Yeah. One of the one of the highest in the world.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. If you look at the graph of it, I think we can link to the Pew Research about this. You know, Sweden is like, only beaten by Belgium when it comes to how high turnout we have. And the gap between these two numbers is so small, whereas the USA, the gap between people who potentially could vote and people who do vote is the biggest, almost the biggest in the world. So that’s a really important thing to reflect on. The work that Dana is doing in removing friction around getting people to actually register is a very, very important step for the US.
Per Axbom
Because in Sweden, I mean, we don’t have to register, we get sent by post our voting cards, and we use those and go to our polling place. Everyone just gets it, we just get sent it
James Royal-Lawson
Automatically when you turn, if you’ve turned 18 during the previous electorial period, at the next election, you will get a card and the card, I mean, for me, I’ve become Swedish during my time living here and I used to get a card that said I had the right to vote two of the elections because we have elections on three levels at the general election, three democratic levels, you know local, district and then national. And I used to be allowed to vote in the bottom two, the regional and district. Whereas now I get a card that says all three. All this happened automatically when I became Swedish. So we don’t have any friction when it comes to registering to vote. If you’re registered in the system, and pretty much everyone is here.
Per Axbom
And if you go to your local polling place, you don’t even need to bring your voting card, you just need to bring ID. And that is even the case if you’re pre-voting somewhere. You only need to bring ID which is amazing. I mean, there’s so little friction to actually go out and vote.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah, exactly. We’ve almost eliminated friction in, definitely with registering. And even with the, when you go into the the voting offices to place your vote. I was reflecting yesterday about how here in Sweden you pick pieces of paper, you have a piece of paper that you pick, and you don’t even have to write anything, you just have to pick the piece of paper for your party,
Per Axbom
Which has the logo printed on it as well as the name
James Royal-Lawson
Okay, Sweden has very, very high literacy rates. So you, but you don’t need to be able to read, you just need to recognise the logo.
Per Axbom
You don’t need to be able to put an X on anything because you just put the piece of paper in an envelope.
James Royal-Lawson
There are three different colours for the three different levels. It’s blue, yellow, and white. Which even if you’re colourblind these work, So there’s some some very, very low barriers in many, many different ways. But thinking of reflecting and thinking about some of the talks that you’ve done Per and what you have even said in the show about how, if you remove friction, too much, remove too much friction, it becomes dangerous in itself.
Per Axbom
Yeah. In the sense that actually now there’s so little friction, you’re opening up to voter fraud.
James Royal-Lawson
Yes. And we I’ve read there’s some in the UK for example, there’s been a few, quite a few examples of how postal ballots especially with elderly have been manipulated, people have been knocking on doors saying, you know, I can help you fill in your personal ballot, and then they’re filling in for their party, not necessarily the party that person would would vote for. So reducing friction opens the door. But you know, then you’ve got to look at it and balance where do you put your effort? With the USA, completely understandable, remove friction to registering because registering is such a problem, Sweden. No, I think maybe the focus has to be elsewhere in the process?
Per Axbom
Probably yes. And I’m thinking now about when you when you say friction, I’m thinking now about all these voting guides, you have online, voting compasses, that sort of quiz you into asking maybe 20 or 30 questions. And then it tells you which party you mostly agree with. And those are the people you should vote for, basically. And the problem with that is, of course, that you’re leaving it to algorithms to decide who you mostly agree with, and it depends on who programmed the algorithm,
James Royal-Lawson
You’re at the mercy of the whim of the programmer, or the design team,
Per Axbom
Right?
James Royal-Lawson
So it’s back to us
Per Axbom
Yeah people are being recommended all the time to do these quizzes. But that means that you’re taking away yet another step in the process of friction, you’re not even expecting people to read up on the different policies that the different parties have.
James Royal-Lawson
And also you’ve got to look at the motivation of why some of these media companies are providing these tools. Some of them are doing it for public service, arguably, but they’re probably driving metrics for visitor numbers. And some of the other commercial stations or commercial papers, they’re driving clicks to support advertising. So you know, the motivation necessary isn’t to help you choose, it’s to kind of get people to come to the site. But you know, I love the link, we’re linking this – Dana said, you know, what difference can we make, we can go out and help volunteer. But at the same time, you can look at the research she’s done and others have done about complexity of ballots and language.
And these are the same things that we really think about and need to think about when we’re designing like online forms. We know that the more fields that you include in the form, the lower success rate you have, the lower conversion you have for the form, completion rates, abandonment goes through the roof. So when you’ve got like the example she used from San Francisco with, like, what was it 40 odd questions, that you would never do that on the web form. We wouldn’t recommend as designers, that you would implement that as a signup form or you know, as your main goal for the website?
Per Axbom
And I mean, that’s essentially the problem when people speak about direct democracy. It depends, of course, how you implement it. And if you have one ballot, with 40, almost 40 questions on it? How do you even expect people to be aware of all the issues that they’re supposed to vote on? I mean, my biggest takeaway from this is, yes, we have a lot of western democracies, but they all work in completely different ways. When it comes to the most important thing that is the basis of democracy, the election process, how do we elect the officials that represent us? And it’s so different and even in the US, and it’s so different even across the different states. So when you move between states, you have to figure out how does it work here,
James Royal-Lawson
And I love how all this is, yet again, that reminder about people are so different. There are so many various behaviours and ways that people interpret and use information and elections are one of those moments where we get to, we get to test something on entire populations and see how they react and respond to things. And that is incredibly valuable for us as designers to, to reflect on and think about the work we do and the work that goes on in democracy and how these two interplay.
Per Axbom
And speaking of research I mean, coming up in our next episode, we talked to user research expert, Cyd Harrell, who has worked with Dana at the Centre for Civic Design. And as a teaser for our interview with Dana, or with Cyd, we asked why her work in voter research felt so important to her.
You said, I have never felt more like a UX designer than when I did research for the Centre for Civic Design. And that seemed to resonate with me, obviously, but with a lot of people who retweeted that and also wrote it on Twitter. I mean, why do you think that was both that it felt like that for you and why it resonates with so many.
Cyd Harrell
The goal was so clear and the impact on people’s lives was so clear. If people can get good information about elections in an unintimidating way it’s, it’s far down sort of in the stack, right? If you can get that good information, and you can really be sure of the way that you want to vote, and you can get access to the ballot. And you know, you have clear information about how voting takes place in your jurisdiction, then hopefully, you can participate. And so it feels like it’s a very deep piece of people’s lives.
And at the same time, six years ago, when we did this, most of these websites were pretty bad, you know, didn’t meet that standard, and not really through the fault of the officials who made them. These are people who are understaffed and underfunded and work really hard to do their best and have actually been really friendly to, you know, talk about these things as well. So, they it’s sort of a perfect research situation where you have a body of can’t call them clients, they weren’t paying us,but a body of product owners who want to improve, you have a lot of users who have a really important task that impacts their lives. And it actually is a problem that’s addressable by design. Sometimes, in government spaces, we run into something things like, well, we really need a better policy, rather than just a new service design or something often they go hand in hand.
Per Axbom
And the goal is so crystal clear so you know what you’re working for. And yeah, sometimes that’s missing, I think from a lot of projects.
Cyd Harrell
Definitely.
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you for listening. We love to hear from you. If Twitter or social media isn’t your thing, then you can email us at hej@UXpodcast.com and that’s the the Swedish one with HEJ or the English British regular one with hey@UXpodcast.com. Remember to keep moving. See on the other side
Per Axbom
Knock knock.
James Royal-Lawson
Who’s there?
Per Axbom
Eva?
James Royal-Lawson
Eva Who?
Per Axbom
Eva you’re deaf or your doorbell isn’t working.
James Royal-Lawson
I couldn’t hear what you said. So I was deaf.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Dana Chisnell recorded in May 2018 and published as Episode 193 of UX Podcast.