Whitney Quesenbery

Episode 24
Brave UX

Strengthening Democracy Through Design

In this episode of Brave UX, Whitney Quesenbery makes the case for strengthening democracy through design, shares how she and her colleagues are making this happen, and why it takes time to achieve.

Highlights include:

What is Civic Design and why is it important?
How is democracy a design problem?
What impact can good design have on elections?
What is the theory of the interested bystander?
How are UXers like midwives?

May 25, 202101:23:19

Listen on:

Who is Whitney Quesenbery?

Whitney is the co-founder and Director of the Center for Civic Design - a non-profit UX consultancy that works to "ensure voter intent through design".

She serves on numerous advisory boards, including The Center for Tech and Civic Life, VotingWorks, and The Participatory Budgeting Project. And, among many other things, she is also the co-creator of the first university course on Election Design and the author of three books on UX.

Before starting the Center for Civic Design, Whitney invested over 23 years solving complex problems, as a UX consultant, for organisations like the National Cancer Institute, the New York Times, and Sage Software.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Whitney Quesenbery. Where do I start? Whitney has done so many amazing things in her career. She's currently based in the DC Baltimore area where she's the co-founder and director of the Center for Civic Design, a nonprofit UX consultancy working to ensure photo intent through design. Whitney serves on the advisory boards for the Center for Tech and Civic Life, Los Angeles County's voting Systems for All People Voting Works and the participatory budgeting project shares also the co-creator of the first course on election design for the University of Minnesota's Certificate and Election Administration, a fellow of the Society for Technical Communication, an expert for both Rosenfeld Media and UIE's Center Centre.
And she's taught UX research at Rutgers University. In her spare time amongst many other things, she's also authored three books on UX, A Web For Everyone, Designing Accessible User Experiences with Sarah Horton, Storytelling for User Experience with Kevin Brooks and Global UX Design and Research in a Connected World with Daniel Zu. Before starting the Center for Civic Design, Whitney invested over 23 years solving complex problems as a consulting UX for organizations like the National Cancer Institute, the New York Times, and Sage Software. But coming back to the present day, Whitney's passionate about making interactions with government effective and enjoyable, and she's here with me now to take a deep dive and to how to make that happen. Whitney, welcome to the show.
Whitney Quesenbery:
Oh, glad to be here, Brendan.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's great to have you here, Whitney. I've really been looking forward to today's conversation and something that came up when I was doing my research for today was that before you were a Uxr, you were a theatrical lighting designer and you were both on and off Broadway. And I understand that was from the mid 1970s until the early nineties. What drew you to the theater?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I think my entire career of everything I've done has been one piece of serendipity after another. I went to college in the seventies and there was a requirement for Jim for physical education and I, not a very gym sort of person but it turned out that there was a dance group and that you would take dance classes and that working on the crew for the dance group would count as gym [laugh]. And I was in this sort of classic liberal arts college and suddenly discovered theater not as, I mean my father was an English teacher. I knew theater as literature but I suddenly discovered theater as performance and was not someone who was very good on stage. I think there are people from that era who would say, you talk in public in front of audiences, no, you can't be the same person. But there's the people who are front and center, which we might think of as our users. And there's the people who create the surround that all that action happens in. And those are the designers. So you see it's really the same business. I've just been doing the same thing in different boxes all along.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh], it sounds like that time in the theater, did unknowing to yourself at the time shape your UX practice? How did those experiences end up playing out and what you were to come to do as a ux?
Whitney Quesenbery:
Sure. I think there are probably a couple of things about it. One is that theater is definitely a team sport, right? I mean, I suppose you know, could be one person in your performer, you're standing on a street corner, but the minute you're doing anything substantial, there's a real team around you. And that team might fight about anything they wanna fight about. But at eight o'clock on performance night, they have to be doing one show. There's only one show you can do at a time and there has to be a director for that. And your job is to all figure out what your slice of that pie is to make that director's vision come true. So that was one. And the other was the whole idea of iteration because what is a dress rehearsal but a usability test and what is the preview performance, but a beta?
And the idea of constantly iterating. I worked briefly as the assistant lighting designer for Big Apple Circus. This is a one Ring circus was one of the people that brought the one Ring Circus to the United States, the European style circus, and they would bring over stars. And one guy they brought over that year was a clown, and he did this wonderful, wonderful act about musical instruments. And he went out the first day in front of this ring full of American children and he bombed. He come really badly. And we all waited for him to say, oh, American children get my art, the sort of thing you might expect. And instead he asked for some ring time. And while we were doing some technical work around the edges you could see that he was walking through his show. He was thinking, oh, somebody laughed there, I got a reaction here.
And that day he built those pieces up and he did that every day for a week until he had them all responding to his show because he didn't say, I'm gonna make a new show for these Americans. He didn't say they're Philistines and they don't understand my art. He just adjusted it bit by bit fine tuned it. And I think that if I had not seen it day by day, I'm not sure I would've known the difference. It was all those little details of the craft that made the difference. And I think that's a lot about, it's pretty easy to make a website these days or to make an app. Anybody can get the tools and make something that stands up and does something, but it's the details. It's all those little things about anticipating what users will react to, what they'll notice, where the friction is, where the slippery slide is, that that's what makes a really great design.
Brendan Jarvis:
It also sounds like he was willing to put his ego aside and to be willing to be wrong and learn from that and improve that experience for his audience.
Whitney Quesenbery:
Yeah, so it didn't take the audience for granted. Mm-hmm. [affirmative] worked to earn them and succeeded because he was so in control of his craft that he could do that.
Brendan Jarvis:
What a great formative experience. Why did you leave?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I moved out of the city and a friend who'd been doing rock and roll was working as the IT director for a small company that was experimenting with this interesting new idea called hypertext. And they needed someone to write some documentation. He said, you're an English major, but you can do this. And so I went down and started writing some documentation and discovered it was really interesting stuff. I've been, I theater design is very technological, so it's very constrained by the limits of what you can do with a lighting instrument. So I wasn't really afraid of the technology, I didn't know much about computers and I was working at a theater in Philadelphia at the time. And to get there, I would drive south and to get to the theater, I would turn right until I get to the office of the company, I would turn left and one day I turned left and I should have been turning right. And I thought, I've just switched careers
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] don on
Whitney Quesenbery:
You. To be fair there's a pretty steep pyramid you have to climb to get. And I'd gotten to a pretty good place in lighting design, but I'm not sure would've made it up the next stair. So there's a bit of that. I think if I'd been doing top shows on Broadway, I probably would not be sitting here talking to you, I'd be talking to someone else, but I wasn't. And I think I was good at lighting, but I think this is really what I was born to do.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's interesting how you can only really see that in hindsight and realize that that was the decision that was being made. It's interesting also cuz there's a parallel there with how Steve Kru entered the industry. He started writing technical manuals as well for a friend because they'd noticed that he was an English major [laugh].
Whitney Quesenbery:
Yeah, well, I mean, look, Steve and I are both old enough that there was a lot more opportunity for that kind of serendipity to happen and people just to get asked to do things. I think there's always a moment in the development of a new profession when everybody came from somewhere else. And so I remember a debate on a lister once that said, someone was talking about the, what's the relationship between user research or design research and journalism. And someone who had been a journalist was talking about the things that they were bringing from that. And someone said, well, does that mean that we should be making all of our students go into journalism? And they went, no, no, no. That's just the path I took. But there are things we can learn about listening and thinking about the difference between short form ethnography and long form journalism and the difference between an interview to get a good bite, sound bite and an interview to really get at a deeper experience.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, there's a lot of transferable skills that exist. [affirmative] a few weeks back I had a conversation with someone who I believe, well Lou Rosenfeld, we spoke about Lou's notion of moment prisons, which is this idea that we trap our ourselves by holding onto tightly to our community or our own definition of who we are and what we do. As someone whose career in UX has spanned 30 years, how have you thought about your role in the industry and how that's evolved in that time?
Whitney Quesenbery:
Oh, I think my role probably hasn't changed that much. I think I've always been kind of a pain in the ass. [laugh], [laugh], [laugh], a little restless all the time. I think Lou talks about that in that interview very, very nicely about how he started, this is a sort of a hobby but I think that the industry changes. And so your relationship to the industry changes mean at one point I was the young outsider and then I was the middle aged insider and now I'm the actually outsider again almost to the industry itself. And I listen to some of the podcasts and I think, no, I'm really not actually in that industry anymore cuz I'm not working on giant design systems at the scale that we work on it now, where you're keeping that many, there's all these I'm chasing different sets of problems when I'm chasing those problems. And I think one of the mistakes as you get older in a field is to think that well, to think that your solutions are the right ones. I mean that's obviously an error. But also to think that each generation or each quasi generation shouldn't be relearning those things because they may come up with something very similar, but it's always got a different flavor, it's got a little different culture. And I think we're learning that happens over time. It happens when you spread geographically and it happens when you go deep into diversity.
Brendan Jarvis:
And Whitney, you're obviously a very considered person and I also get the sense that you are a really patient and persistent person as well. Is that a fair description? And where do those attributes come from?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I had red hair when I was younger. No, I think when I said I was a pain in the ass, I sort of meant that both realistically and jokingly, which is that [laugh] I've always been someone who comes in and rearranges the furniture in a room, warm giving a workshop. And I've always been someone who sort of insists that there ought to be ways that are better. My joke about my politics is that I grew up with my parents in New York City and I thought that what you did on Sunday was you went a hundred thousand of your closest friends marched down fifth Avenue about something [laugh]. So that notion that you had agency to change the world is something I was privileged enough to grow up with. I mean privilege in all the senses of that. And that's made me, I think a lot of UXers in particular look at the world and go, why is it so hard and what can I do about that? And when you're lucky, you find a place where it's something you actually care about. Not just UX part of it but the actual thing you're ing, right? The thing you're designing that something you really care about and where you can gain enough expertise to be listened to. And so you get a of positive feedback loop on being able to do that. And you learn how to be a positive galy.
Brendan Jarvis:
Not that I
Whitney Quesenbery:
Want about it
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] [laugh]. Well you wouldn't be human if you didn't. Let's be honest. It's a big, big job that you're undertaking with the Center for Civic Design. And I do want to come back to this full circle that you've almost made from your time as a child growing up in New York and being aware of the sort of political movement there and now where you find yourself and what you're doing professionally. [affirmative], before we do that, I have to ask you this question because it's something that I believe my mother-in-law will be particularly interested in because she, up until recently, was the CEO of the New Zealand midwifery council, [affirmative]. And I heard you previously describe UXers as midwives and I was really interested in that analogy. What did you mean by that?
Whitney Quesenbery:
Midwife does have a baby. A midwife creates the circumstance in which a woman who is pregnant can have a baby. That's a good experience and that's safe actually the senior person on my dorm when I was a freshman grew up to become one of the first licensed home nurse midwives in New Jersey, [affirmative]. And had a lot to say about the difference between having a baby in a hospital and having a baby at home. And it wasn't just the furniture that there's a whole different sort of goal and aesthetic about it and how you approach the activity. And it's easy to think about birthing as a big thing, but each interaction is a little event. And the goal is not for us to feel great, the goal is for someone else to have had a great experience
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative].
Whitney Quesenbery:
And where there's a lot of people of something they wanna say, cuz you're the mother, the mother's mother, the rest of the family, they're all part of that ecosystem. So when we focus on human computer in action, it's hands on keyboard. We're not only are we forgetting the whole person, but we're forgetting the room they're sitting in and the people outside of that room and all those little threads that you can pull to think about that person in a space, in a place and time, in a culture and time. And this all sounds very highfalutin. And so I think you can think about it very carefully sometimes when you're doing early research. And if you've done that research well then those questions of who all the different people you're designing for are floating around in your head. I mean that's what we were trying to do with personas was to create a way [affirmative] to sort pin some of that down and make sure that you remember that you're not designing for yourself and you're not just designing for one person but you're designing for multitudes of people. Maybe you're designing a product that's used by a very small group of people and they're pretty homogeneous in some way. And that in some ways is the easiest thing to do. But we have succeeded, computers have changed the world, we're all using them that where our lives depend on them. And now we have everybody's lives in their hands, in our hands.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I mean your design challenge that you're tackling at the moment, which we're about to come to, is almost the opposite because there is almost no homogeneous link between everybody that participates in democracy. In fact, it's kind of fundamental to democracy that it embraces everybody of all creeds and types. The center for civic design and the term civic desi design isn't necessarily something that a lot of people will be overly familiar with. So before we get diving into the details, what is civic design?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I think civic design is design that, I don't know we have a good word for it, but things right that happen in the civic space. It's a little different than civic tech, which really is focused on using the technologies of UX and technology in general in the service of a civic space. But we're really focused on the design side of that. We don't do much. People say, well, can you help us design our website? And the answer is no, but we'll be happy to help you do the research to understand what you need. So we chose design over research because we didn't wanna get pegged as just a research institute. We're very practical. All of our research is aimed at a goal but it is all in the civic space. And I think one of the things about working in the civic space is that you don't get to decide which segment of the audience you're into appeal to.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now that must make for some interesting challenges.
Whitney Quesenbery:
It does and it doesn't actually. In some ways I think what happens is that we think about how to make things as seamless and transparent and easy as possible. I mean, we're not the only people doing it. I think the work of the GDS in the UK when they think about how do you help someone sign up for carers allowance, right? This person is not there to interact with the computer, they're not there to have fun with it. They're there to affect a change in their life in some way. And the transformation of government websites across the world is really remarkable. Thinking about how simple can it be? How can we work in plain language, whatever that means in that culture and how can we make it easier for people? I mean it, it's truly, how can we actually make it usable? Because it turns out that the way you make something usable for everybody is to make it usable for the most stressed person, the person with the least resources to manage the bumps that we create.
And if you can smooth out all those bumps when I worked for National Cancer Institute there was a lot of, well doctors or doctors and they can read complicated things. And one of the things I worked on was a series on the website called Treatment summaries [affirmative]. And they had a patient version and a professional version and it would look at the research behind it and how many clinical trials had been done to what was the outcomes of those trials for doctors who might be either advising patients or actually prescribing things. There was a much more fancy algorithm for work working through the real detailed science, but this was at a reading level and many scientific journals, they would say there have been five clinical trials, blah, blah, blah, semi blah blah blah, semicolon blah blah blah. Semi in a big paragraph. And we said, what if we put them in bullets, [laugh]?
And they said, oh, we're afraid that people won't think it actually is scientific enough if it doesn't look, if it looks too much, if it looks too casual, if it doesn't look official. But the person in charge of this agreed. And we mocked it up with some bullets and we did some usability testing with a variety of different kinds of doctors. And I still remember one of them who looked at it and he went, oh my god, national cancer has discovered the bullet because now you can see that there's five of them cuz you see five bullets, you can tick through it quickly, you can jump over it if you don't need it, you don't have to pars out this big sentence. And so it's not that he was incapable of reading that paragraph, it's that it was a little extra work for him. And so we've made it a little easier for that doctor to read it, but we've made it a lot easier for a patient to read it who's not maybe not very medically trained. And so by making it it sort of lifts all boats and we've made it easy for people who are not reading, used to reading medical journals to par through the information. And we've made it faster for people who are, and one person said to us, well it really helps me make sure I'm not making mistakes cuz it shows me which section of this long, long sentence is related to that thing. And I don't have to separate the calmest to figure out which chunks of words go together.
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative], it sounds like this would've been quite an eye-opening experience for the National Cancer Institute to park their need to be seen as overly official and put the needs of the user in terms of the understandability, the readability, the learnability of that content to the forefront.
Whitney Quesenbery:
That's right. Or understanding that an oncology nurse might be looking for something on the website, not for herself, but to give to a patient
Brendan Jarvis:
And under pressure, like you mentioned under stress
Whitney Quesenbery:
Where they have 15 minutes between patients and that. So the question is how can we maximize those and how can we make sure they don't make an invert mistake all the of the design that goes into hospitals and making sure that the right tubes get connected to the right things, right [affirmative] we could apply that to information as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I really like that. Now this wasn't something that you were always involved in. I mentioned in your introduction that you spent 23 years and I think these are your own words here, as a regular UX [laugh], how did you move from read a regular UX into civic design? How did this happen?
Whitney Quesenbery:
Well, 2020 happened you may recall we had a presidential election that year. I've
Brendan Jarvis:
Tried to blank out the last four years.
Whitney Quesenbery:
No, no, this was 20, I'm sorry, 2000, not 2020. Oh
Brendan Jarvis:
Right, okay. Gonna say
Whitney Quesenbery:
Two twos in two zeros. But no, it was 2000 and we had a presidential election that was a contested election in the end. And
Brendan Jarvis:
This is Bush Gore.
Whitney Quesenbery:
This is Bush Gore where it came down to a UX problem. It was an alignment problem of which little hole went to which little thing. But it wasn't, that wasn't the real problem. A real problem was that the actual thing you cast as a ballot was an IBM punch card and you'd punched holes in something that had no writing on them. So how are you supposed to translate those that together? And what had happened in Palm Beach County was that the election official was doing some reading on her audience, which is largely elderly people. It's a very old county retirement community. And so she tried to make the text bigger and in making the text bigger, she forced that what's called a butterfly ballot where were like, here's candidate one, candidate two, candidate three, candidate four. And so the real tragedy is that the design mistake she made was made out of good intentions, was made trying to solve one problem and not having a good way to understand the total impact of that. So I had just been elected myself to the, what was then Usability Professionals Association and they said, you're gonna do outreach, go do something about elections [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
So what did you think?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I went to a lot of conferences and listened to talks and read a lot of things. And the next thing I knew I was becoming a bit of an expert because there was so little competition for that role [affirmative]. And in 2002 there was a law pass called the Help America Vote Act that enabled a lot of things to happen and one of them was setting up some voting system standards. So I had been on the design standards, wars and lots of companies and now I was on the Design Standard Awards and I got nominated to that committee.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is the federal advisory, this
Whitney Quesenbery:
Is the federal that I've read about committee, this is an official federal advisory committee, wasn't their first choice. I know who the first choice was. I mean I helped pick what I hope was their first choice. But anyway, they asked me and I got to be the chair for what was called Human Fact, no human factors and privacy, so usability, accessibility, privacy languages. And we had a nine month assignment to write the draft, the first voting system standards for the Election assistance Commission to approve. They also formed the Election Assistance Commission. It was, it's kabuki, a fellow advisor committee is both a lot of hard work and kind of formal theater about what you can do and what you can say when and who could talk to whom and all of those things. And I thought, great, I'll do my nine months here and I'll go back to being UX and I'm still working on this on voting system standards because we just passed, we just approved the aac, just approved version 2.0, which is a third version.
There was a 1.1 and [affirmative] sometimes I look at it and think, wow, we've done some amazing things and we really got to do some good research about it. And sometimes I think we've come so pathetically little away from where we were that we're still sort of battling through what understanding the user experience of voting actually is. I think we spent a lot of time on font sizes and things and maybe we've gotten them this time, maybe we haven't but we've gotten 'em closer. And it's important cuz you have to get the font size. Sometimes we have to actually read the screen before you can begin to think about what voting means to them. But these days I'm much more interested in the sort of bigger social pictures and how those impact things.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well lucky you're a patient and persistent person as we just spoke about
Whitney Quesenbery:
[laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Suppose those qualities will serve you well in this endeavor.
Whitney Quesenbery:
Yeah, I mean we learn things like there's a program called the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. It's a periodic federal survey of literacy in the country. And they have for narrative, for reading, just narrative texts, they have four things. There's below basic, intermediate and expert and it's like it's a bill curve, 13% on ends and curves in the middle. And when you add up the numbers, what you see is that 44% of Americans who can read adults who can read at basic or below basic levels.
And it's not just first I thought, my God, what an indictment of the American education system. But it turns out that those numbers are actually pretty consistent across the anglosphere. So Canada, uk, Australia, New Zealand. And it's because speeches, speech is innate. We will leave two babies on island that will develop speech if they survive that long [affirmative]. But reading actually cover new pathways in your brain. And so there's a bunch of interesting things about it. One is that once you've learned to read, and most of the people I know read at an expert level it's almost impossible to think about what it's like not to be someone who reads because you, you've become a reader. [affirmative], maybe being bilingual can't hard to imagine what it's like to be monolingual if you grew up bilingual and vice versa maybe. But it means that there's a huge swa of people who get along just fine in daily life, read basic things.
But when we ask them then to read a complicated piece of law and vote on it, which sounds like a great democracy in action, but they're hard. And sometimes they're written deceptively but sometimes they're just written so they're difficult to understand. So even if we leave out the political issues and the potential for wanting to deceive people into voting one way we're asking people to make some big decisions without giving them enough resources to understand the implications of those decisions. And the usual thing I hear from advocates is, well let's put more stuff on the ballot. Let's put more words in front of them, [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
Give them more of what they don't understand.
Whitney Quesenbery:
And it's hard to sit back and refactor something as big as an election. I mean I don't know anybody I know who's been through a big redesign process who hasn't had that moment. When you say, why are we calling it this thing? Why are we calling it a partial backup key? Why aren't we calling it something that's like normal language so people understand it and then doing the really hard work to find the right word that people understand again, all those details. So
Brendan Jarvis:
You've said that democracy is a design problem and that seems to be quite central to the Center Pacific Design's mission. How is democracy a design problem and how are you working to solve that problem?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I think we've shifted on this over time. At first we were like, there's just stuff, there's all this stuff. There's these ballots and these instructions and these websites and these campaign statements and we could design them better, we could make a better experience, we could make it easier to register to vote by making a well-designed app for registering to vote [affirmative]. But I think we've come into a much bigger view, which is that it's really a service design problem. It's really a cultural design problem. And that if you think about it as a craft or technological challenge, you will improve the usability of the thing or maybe the beauty of the thing that exists. But you won't have necessarily addressed any underlying real mismatches between the needs of voters, the needs of election administrators, the needs of campaign candidates and the needs of society in general.
I'm gonna come back to diversity here, which is to say that there's a lovely slogan going around that I really adore, which is that democracy works for us all when it includes us all. And this is sort of obvious that if you have a democracy, you actually want everybody to vote. We want everybody to be part of it in some way. And so we've begun thinking about what are the things that keep people from participating not necessarily because someone is trying to keep them from voting, but because the way voting is presented keeps them from voting. And whether that's not understanding that you have to register before you can vote or not understanding that you have to be at a certain place at a certain time or a certain day to vote or what the process of voting by mail is or any of the, you know can get those pictures bigger and bigger and bigger. To keep asking those why it's laddering the five why until you are really looking at democracy itself.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let's talk about democracy itself. Let's do that. Let's zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Why is it important for democracies across the world to make it easy for their citizens to understand and to participate in government services and events like elections?
Whitney Quesenbery:
If you don't think that your government works for you in some way, you don't have a stake in it. And if you don't have a stake in it, you're either cast out of that belonging or you and at some point you begin to resent it and that problem gets worse and worse and worse. So if you don't feel that in your town that you look at the town council and there's anybody from your community there, whatever, however you design, define community, whether it's women, whether it's race, race or ethnicity, whether it's language, whether it's part of town. If we exclude people we have basically said you're not part of democracy, you are actually subjects and who are democracy are effectively your rulers. And I don't think it's very good for society. I don't think it without even appealing to, it's just not what democracy means. I think it actually creates an unstable society and
Brendan Jarvis:
Are some,
Whitney Quesenbery:
And that's what we're living in and that's what we're living with right now is an unstable society of people who said enough.
Brendan Jarvis:
There are some people that will say, why should we invest money and resources and making democracy more accessible to people, whether they be really poor people or disabled people or recent migrants. Why should we invest and spend all this money making it accessible to them? What would you say to those people?
Whitney Quesenbery:
Well my first challenge is how much money are we really, are you actually spending? It's actually no harder to make something that's usable than it is to make something that isn't right. If you're picking where vote centers should be cited is it really harder to actually think about the map and where people actually live and how they get there and make sure that things are on transfers? Maybe it takes a little bit more time but not orders of magnitude more. I think the one thing that does cost more money is language access, which we have in the United States. If there's sufficient density of people who don't speak English well and do speak a specific other language, we require materials to be in that language. I actually think that that is one of the stepping stones to civic engagement to being really engaged as a citizen.
I was talking to a young woman who had just become a citizen. She was Chinese, she had a baby, her husband worked in a tech company and we asked if she was registered to vote and she said, not yet. I know I have to do it but I have so many other things. I have the baby, I have the apartment, I have to learn how to shop in a new place and I'll get there. And I think part of it is that her English wasn't great and we were actually talking to her in, I mean wasn't talking to her Chinese but had someone with me who was speaking to her in Chinese and we were going back and forth with an English in Chinese Mandarin actually. And you could see that if she had to struggle through reading all of this in English, it was gonna be a lot on top of everything else.
That was a lot. And so if we could make it easier for her to understand the steps she needed to take to be a voter, in fact if we could reduce those steps entirely, I'll get to that in a minute then we're actually inviting her in to being a citizen, to being a full-fledged citizen, not just someone who's just passed, has just taken the nationalization ceremony. And so we've begun thinking about everything we do as invitations that we inviting people to take the next step. [affirmative], there's a thing we're doing with voting by mail, which is that in some place, in some states, if you pack your ballot up and you send it back and you've neglected to sign it or something like that, they will get in touch with you and you have a chance to come in and fix that. And it's a great program except that not many people take them up on it.
Partly cuz sometimes it happens after election day and election's been called so there's a little disincentive or maybe it just looks like a hassle and you did your thing and you're done and why. So we started thinking about how you can reframe this, we really want your vote to count. It's not hard. A lot of other people might make these mistakes too. That's why we have this program. So here's the steps you need to take and then how easy can we make them? Do we have to get on a bus and go downtown? Do you have to trust the US mail that's gonna get you some by some time? Or could you pick up your phone and scroll your signature, hopefully not scroll it but carefully write your signature and send it in via, via the internet. Is there way to use technology to connect people more easily? Is there a way to invite them to do it? Is there a way to make the whole process easier for them so that they're more likely to say yes to that? Because we know that participation is a habit
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]
Whitney Quesenbery:
And you're creating those muscles, all the things about behavioral science, think about how you create those little habits that build up into bigger habits like that.
Brendan Jarvis:
You know, mentioned something earlier on we sort of touched on that there might be some incentive in the system to disincentivize participation or change the tools or the artifacts that are used in elections. Whether it's just the wording of a particular vote that you're asking people to cast in a way that favors one group over another. How much of bad civic design in the United States of America is intentional or by design?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I actually think very little of it is by design. I think there's some policy that may have been well intentioned but has disparate impact. And I think this year we're seeing things that are definitely aimed at reducing the ability to vote. But I think it also just takes reframing it. You think well have, right? Our counties elections are run at the county, let's have a Dropbox in every county. Seems fine. But I live in a county of 17,000 people or so, very small county and there's really one downtown. And so having the Dropbox there seems adequate. And what little public transportation we have will get you close to it. But Houston, [laugh] Baltimore, they're very different places. And one Dropbox for that size city is a very different question. And so we're not asking the question as we create policy who is left out? And so I, we are nonpartisan, we stay out of the political wars but we do believe that whatever policy has been voted on every voter deserves a good implementation of that policy.
They deserve to understand it, they deserve to know how to vote within it. And occasionally that means that we support policy that we don't agree with, but at least we can make it easier for them to actually do it. And it does make a difference. I have some stats for it if you want some numbers. Yeah, please. In Michigan they went to, no excuse absentee, we helped them revise their ballot envelopes. Detroit wasn't included in this but most of the rest of the state went and they went from 0.49%. So just about half a percent of unsigned envelopes to 0.06%. Now it wasn't just the envelopes, this is really important that there was a whole campaign around the fact that they had no excuse absentee it was a new envelope, it made people look at it fresh again. And we spent a lot of time thinking about what could somebody do that would invalidate their vote.
I mean this is an election tragedy. Someone requests a ballot, gets the ballot in the mail, votes the marks, the ballot gets the ballot and the envelope sends it back and it's not counted. That is an election tragedy. So what are the things that keep that from happening? And everything about our design is focused on two things. One is pointing people to the things they have to do on that envelope to make sure that it gets counted. And the second is helping election officials process it better. So it's a very simple design. I mean there's really nothing much to it, but it's got a blue stripe on the envelope that's going towards the voter and it's got a different color stripe on any other envelope that's got a ballot in it that's heading back to the election office. So it helps us Postal service it helps if you're looking at a heap of ballots that have just been dropped off, the beige ones, the tan ones are from overseas and the purple ones are your voters and the red ones are people who had a replacement ballot and you have to make sure you have that sort of thing.
So it helps [affirmative] process those ballots faster. So it's a it kind of little mini machine, but it's also designed to be recognizable in your stack of mail that when you know, go to one of the lecture fish talked to who's talked about the ten second trip from the mailbox to the kitchen trash and can it survive that trip and not just get dumped out with the other garbage and all the junk mail that comes in.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, sounds like you've been really intentional with that design. It's obviously made a big difference. Whitney, in 2017 you said live in a country with some of the worst turnout for elections in the world, but that's not just elections, it's the worst engagement with government. It's the worst sense that government is our government. Even though it's the promise of America, we've lost that promise somehow. Do you still feel that way?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I do. I think that if we think the democratic elections of the core, our society then people not participating is a sign of illness. I think this year, well 2020 was kind of an amazing year in so many ways. People used to ask why the turnout is so bad. For one thing, we vote for a lot of things. We have a lot of elections compared to most other countries [affirmative]. And that's just a challenge. We vote for things like surveyor in some places. As one voter said to me, isn't that a job that you hire somebody for? Why is this something I'm electing and how do I know if there are any good? Right? So we're asking people to make a lot of decisions and I think, but so I think often we don't vote because it doesn't matter that much we think yeah, one survey or another fair. But it turns out that when it matters, which we show up and that's what happened last year. It was very clear that it mattered. That it mattered on many, many levels and people did show up and lots of people showed up. It wasn't just one demographic that showed up, it wasn't just one party that showed up, everybody showed up and elections roast the occasion. I mean they ran a pretty near flawless election in a pandemic, hurricanes, just everything that could possibly not
Brendan Jarvis:
Security risks.
Whitney Quesenbery:
Security risks. I remember talking to a election official in the city that was having demonstrations at the time and he was in the basement of city hall. The city hall was closed, it was summer there was no air conditioning, the lights were off and the rest of the building there were police barricades all the way around the building and he was trying to run an election [affirmative]. And we came through that. And I think that to me is sort of the glimmer of hope. What's happening now is not so much of glimmer earth hope, and I hope it's just a little pendulum thing. But in the midst of all this, there was a working group assembled by some people from Harvard's Ash Center and Brookings Institution, Brooking Center, looking at universal voting, which is if you're from Australia, that you are required to vote and if you don't, you have to pay a small fine or have an excuse [affirmative].
And very few people take them up on that. It just is a habit of the idea that everyone should vote. And I have to say when I was invited to be in this working group, I thought was never gonna happen. Mean there's so many things we have to do to get there and we sort of agree that before you can start talking about universal voting, you have to actually be very close to it, right? Cuz you can't take that big a leap. And that means you have to have good voter registration, you have to use all the tools of government to keep up with people. We have something called the National Voter Registration Activist passed in the nineties also called Motor Voter. And the idea was that what does almost everybody do you get your ID or your driver's license at the Motor vehicle's office?
So why don't we register right there? We're getting your date of birth, your address, we're getting all these things we're ing to see your ID because it becomes a defacto ID and why don't we register people there? And it was a great idea. But in the nineties saying we're gonna register voters either asking 'em if they wanted to have a piece of paper mailed to them or handing them a piece of paper, but now we can just say, is it okay we're gonna update your address. And so in 20 some states we have some form of automated voter registration in Colorado. They started with it, they ask you the question and you have to say, no, I don't wanna be registered. So we flipped it from an opt in to an opt out. And then they said, well they discovered that 20% of people who opt out and who were registered, who were eligible to vote and were registered actually had changed their address and hadn't taken advantage of this opportunity to just have that happen.
So they said, well being registered will treat that as the opt in and will update your address. And now they're doing it back in. So they actually just take everybody if they can determine that you're eligible to vote they know your age. If you've shown some sort of idea that shows that you're a citizen and they send you a card that says, by the way, we just added you to the voting rules. If this isn't right, here's the data. If this isn't right, let us know. Oregon again, Oregon started this they were a leader in that as well. And the states are in various places and adopting this. But in four years we've gone from maybe five years, we've gone from one state to almost half the states having auto automated for automated registration. I think that the mental model for an average everyday person is that you look at that capital with a big dome and under that dome there's a big computer and all the little government agencies use that computer.
And so of course if they told wet agency where they live, why doesn't the other one? And they don't get that agencies are fragmented and they run their own systems and the systems are 150 years old and they don't understand all of that. So I think we're actually beginning to make government work the way people expect government to work. Not in a big brother sort of way, but in a taking care of easy business. So we need that it to be possible for people to vote easily. We need it. We need all sorts of things. We need voting to be accessible. Then we can begin to talk about setting an expectation that everyone will in fact participate. And it was very interesting watching, thinking about the constitutional challenges and the legal challenges and the policy challenges and would this, who would this hurt and who would it benefit?
But in the end all the work that we're doing about wanting to make the friction against voting, to reduce that friction, to drop the little barriers that come along. And we do think there are little barriers. It's not usually one big giant barrier, it's usually a series of missed opportunities. Little thing that was a little too hard, I had to wait in line, I didn't have a stamp, I didn't. And all these things just add up to someone not quite voting. And we know there's social bias against it because more people report to the census that they voted in the last election than the total turnout. So I think that people want to vote, they just are being nibbled to death by ducks, by the little, little barriers that keep them from voting. A researcher named Kate Contreras did a really wonderful project or led a project that came up with this idea of the interested bystander. It's not that people are disengaged, watchings go by and when there's something that they think is important, they'll step in. Whether that's youth tennis or electing a school board member. But if things are ticking along, they might just let somebody else take care of it. And so the question is how do we change that attitude to say no, we really kind of wanna hear from you.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let's give people listening. A practical example, which I know that you are really closely tied to and I suspect quite proud of. And that's in California, I believe, as a result of some research that you led, there was a law that was passed, I believe it's law 3 0 6 oh. Could you tell us a little bit about that law and how that came to be as well as the difference that passing that law has made for the citizens that it represents or it relates to?
Whitney Quesenbery:
This is a funny one. So California has a voter bill of rights. It's actually a very good bill of rights. 10, 10 things. They're all good things. It was carefully hammered out. We were working on a project to, they also require both the counties and the state to send voter guides to the state sends to every household. The county sends it to every registered voter. The project had a fancy name how voters get information. But we called it do the trees that die to make these guys have they given their lives in vain, right? [laugh]. So if we're gonna spend all of that time and money and resources and effort and trees to get a pile of paper and in San Francisco this county voter guide can be a hundred pages on newsprint. So we're not talking about small things here. Can we make them actually work for voters?
And so we were crisscrossing the state doing research. And in our last round of research we were in Berkeley at an adult literacy center. So we're working with working adults who were still learning to read. Dan Schnell, with whom I found at the center, was actually conducting this session. And the voter bill of rights had we, we'd left it out of our first version cuz we thought it's something that hangs on a wall and does anybody read it? And people start saying, no, this is important. And so we put it in the back of the book and people said, no, it doesn't go in the back of the book. This is really important. It's gotta go in the front. And we're like, should it be right inside the front cover? Oh no, no, I wanna know who's running the election. Not the next page, that's the table of contents.
But right after that [affirmative]. And so she was working with the gentleman and he got to that page and he read it very slowly and very carefully, very seriously. And she asked the question that we asked next, which is, did you learn anything new? What did you learn here? Is there anything that was surprising to you? And he said, I think this says I can vote. He'd been in prison when he was young. He'd gotten out it'd been liberalized since then. So in that intervening time, his rights had been restored to him, but he had to act on it. Nobody went and looked him up and figure out where he was living. And we had a legal and voters person with us and she whipped out her laptop and registered to vote on the spot. Not one to miss an opportunity. She's very proud of the number of people she registered and she told that.
And so we started thinking about what were the things that tripped people up on it? Was it too hard to read? Why did it take them so long? And she told that story at a legislative hearing. [affirmative], someone said, well we should be able to write all this stuff in plain language. And they said, well, all is a big number. Why don't we just focus on this one document at first. And then Secretary of State Padilla was behind this as well. And so we started working on the text. We worked closely with the Secretary of State's office and what they did was we did what we called usability testing and they called community review because they're required to do community review. We did them as intercepts. We went out and with the Secretary of State staff with someone from the legal women voters tried it out with 80 people in the course of two days Chris Ross sound going to community centers and places like that, libraries and homeless encampments and all kinds of things.
And came up with a version that we liked and they did a little more official comment period of it and came up with a version that is hangs in every single polling place. That is actually not a huge impact when you think about it. We designed, redesigned a poster basically. But here's the impact that it had was that all the people we worked with in the our project was through a group called The Future of California Elections. And their goal was to bring together state and county election officials with get out the vote advocates with good government advocates with language access people, with disability people, and get them all working on making California elections work again. So that we collaborated on things together. And so were on a research grant from them. We were doing regular reports to people and we were talking about it and several of 'em came and helped us. A lot of the members of that group helped us set up places. We'd piloted things with some of the election offices. And to me, the moment when I knew we we'd done something good was at one of their annual conferences.
There's a slightly complicated thing about California voting that has to be explained in the voter guide. And it was hard. And we had done a bit of it, but they had carried that work on and I had been looking at what they had on the website so I'd be prepared to talk to them. And someone came up and said, what do you think? And I went over and I looked at it and it was really good. And they said, we're so glad we did everything you used to do. We really tried to channel all the things that you were teaching us [laugh]. And so it sort of changed the attitude in a Secretary of State's office of largest state in the country, one of the largest states in the country. And that filters down to the county elections. It filters down to every voter. And that is the beginning or part of a shift from an attitude of we're having an election show up to actually making an election that invites participation because we could design everything beautifully and it's not gonna change it, but we can change people's, people can see that beautifully design things make a difference to voters and that it makes their life easier and that they get props for it.
And that begins to change the election culture.
Brendan Jarvis:
So I mean, just how important is it to involve these stakeholders, these elected officials and the people that run these political bodies or these civic bodies in the process of research and design? How important is that?
Whitney Quesenbery:
It's critical. It's just critical. We started, cuz we wanted to make things better for voters. What we very quickly figured out was that all the things that we were trying to make better came from someplace. And the place they come from is called the election office. So actually most of our work is actually with election officials are now getting, sometimes we knock on the door and say, don't you let us help us do it. But often they call us and say something's happened. They might say, there's been a law change and we have to redesign things and can you help us do it better? So we put out a lot of toolkits and samples and things cuz there's not so only so many of us. And then we realized that a lot of the things that made it hard for them to make things good were because the policy was written in a clumsy way or cuz it wasn't a great policy.
So this's just written badly or requires that the law has text in it that says, and they shall sign a statement that says, and instead of saying it something that people might understand, they've said something that's just complicated and big and makes it hard. And so we began thinking about where are the policy barriers now we're five one C three, which is a kind of non-profit. We don't do lobbying, but we can point out [laugh] when there are barriers to that. So we did a paper last year Sean Simon Johnson who's now working for us as a linguist, came in and we looked at all the little oaths that you have to sign, a little statements, voters have to sign on the back of their absentee ballot envelope. And while I don't like grade level, we looked at how hard it was to read, how many words was it, how packed it was, how hard those words were.
And we started trying to unpack it. What was the simplest thing we could do? It turns out bullets was the first step and then we could shorten some, take out some of the noise words and in three or four steps we could get without changing the policy or the law or the intent of that statement, we could get to something that instead of skewing towards requiring a postgraduate degree to read, it would skew towards being normal everyday people over to the lower end of literacy. Because if we're asking you to sign something that says, yes, I'm who I am and I've done the right things and I've done anything, what good is that signature if you don't understand what you've just signed in some big deep metaphysical way. So if we take seriously the meaning of that voter oath for that voter statement, then we should be making it understandable. And so we start pointing,
Brendan Jarvis:
You should need a lawyer there to help you interpret what it is that you are signing yourself up
Whitney Quesenbery:
For. That's right. So we have many usability people. We don't have a lot of power, but we have a lot of persuasive tools and we don't have to work with every election official, we just have to work with enough election officials.
Brendan Jarvis:
So let's talk about these election officials. They're obviously quite an important part in making civic design experiences. I wouldn't say, or maybe I would say enjoyable, but at the very least usable [affirmative]. What do we know about the design of the status quo and how when that's not good, it affects the wellbeing of the people that are put in those positions to administer the civic experience? What do we know if anything about that?
Whitney Quesenbery:
Well, what we know is that when things are hard to use two things happen. People use them wrong or they do something they do wrong with them and they complain about it [laugh]. So if you can reduce, I mean there's more attention to election administration than there used to be. So MIT has something called the election performance index that looks at a number of measurable indicators and creating a little healthy competition isn't a bad thing. I think the other thing is that when someone is administering an office that is difficult to engage with, then I think you get a sort of circle the wagons mentality cuz in your heart you do a usability test for somebody they know there's problems, but they haven't quite admitted that to themselves. And so part of what usability testing does is sort bring a big mirror in and say [laugh], back when I worked in commercial thing I I projects, I would also say, well, before I would do my report, I would say, well what do you think is wrong?
And I'd people to write it down and some post-it notes and I'd collect them. So no one had to say it out loud and they knew what the problems were. So if you're trapped in a situation where you've got an a creaky system and you've inherited a lot of why things the way they are in many places, especially elections, is that that's the way they were. So I stole the way they are we or I don't know how to make it better. I don't know. And so you tend to circle the wagons and then you start seeing your voters as the other instead of seeing them as your people. And that's never good for anybody. I think we're about to see a lot of election officials leave the industry and it's really a tragedy because they did a good job. But I think they're starting to say I didn't sign up for death threats.
And so there's a counter case to what you're doing, which is that they did everything and they're still not really being believed. But I think that when a county clerk in a county clerks are often also the election officials in a small thing said, look, in a big city the number of people who complain or get things wrong, it's, it's a number at a call center, right? Because you're big. But when someone comes in to complain to me, they're standing across the counter from me and they're yelling at me. And so I think there's a thing that happens in small counties, which is they're very close to at least some of their voters. Maybe not all of them cuz they may not have thought about it. But the bigger the jurisdiction is, the creeker bureaucracy tends to be the more harder it is to they more underfunded. Often everybody's underfunded in elections but it just makes it harder to be the kind of office you want to be. And so when I see cities, especially the big cities starting to make these strides, hiring people who actually know communications to be a communications person, not just hiring someone and saying, your job is communications. That they're beginning to really think about how they use social media, how they use other outreach tools.
It's great. It's great seeing that. And so one of the things that when they get everybody responds to praise, things go well, you get told you did something right, you know, smile a little bit and you try a little harder the next time. And creating those virtuous cycles I think is really important. And so one of the things we was pitching about, maybe not us formal usability testing, but some sort of reaching out to the people who will use something and having a quick check on it before you do it. It means that you're less likely to have people mad at you and then you can do the good things you wanna do because you're not spending time defending yourself or you're not spending time doing regard actions against being fired, for instance.
Brendan Jarvis:
Mm-hmm. Some of that anger that those officials have experienced recently doesn't really seem to be pegged to any realm of reality. At least not that I can discern from way over here in the other side of the world in New Zealand. From your experience in and around election officials and the apparatus of democracy, [affirmative], how hard is it to commit election fraud?
Whitney Quesenbery:
It's very hard. And why is
Brendan Jarvis:
That?
Whitney Quesenbery:
Well, in person election is vanishingly rare, partly because it's resource intensive. Maybe you can add one more vote, but I worked as a poll worker in a very small 5,000 person town. I was a newcomer, I'd only been there 30 years, that kind of town. And it was like a town council meeting. The per one person I worked the table with ran the sort of sports events and the other person was on the planning commission and everybody was something right except me, [affirmative], I was just lived there. No, there was a couple of, and people knew each other. The number of people who walked up to our table to check in to vote who were addressed by their first name was really high. And so think about how hard it would be to commit Imperson impersonation fraud in that context. And really polling places were small communities.
There were people who knew people and there are people watching mean the candidates are allowed to send people to observe and make sure that things are going well. But even if you sort challenged that statement there was a project that some people who believed in voter fraud ran. So they looked for signs that people had voted twice and things like that. And they examined literally millions of records and they found 12 potential examples of which most of them were just mistakes. Someone was registered in two places that they hadn't actually voted because they had moved and never taken their name off the roll. So it's really rare election fraud is less rare. So North Carolina where someone was collecting ballots from people and marking them themselves and they actually threw out the election and ran it and people went to jail for it. But that was, it's not an individual voter fraud. That's election fraud. They're quite different. We have a lot
Brendan Jarvis:
Of the differences in terms of the intent and the scale.
Whitney Quesenbery:
No, who's doing it?
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. Okay. And who was doing it in that example
Whitney Quesenbery:
Can a campaign for one of the candidates.
Brendan Jarvis:
Right. Okay. Yeah. Right.
Whitney Quesenbery:
So those things do happen but they also get caught in, we know about this because they got caught. And so one of, but if people understood that piece of paper and that envelope they'd handed them was their official ballot and that they should be licking that envelope and closing it up before they hand it to 'em if it was easier to send back if you didn't need a stamp, if you didn't need their assistance. So you can think about where are the places where we've created friction that allow actors to slip in.
Brendan Jarvis:
So if someone was listening to this and they might be on the fence at the moment in terms of the integrity of the American election system, what would you say to them?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I'd say that in general it's pretty good. I think that there is a lot of work to do to bring these big systems into the 20th, 21st century. I've done a lot of work on automatic registration, which means working with the Department of Motor Vehicles and they think election people have a lot of money because they are our defacto ID card and they're working with systems that were built in the fifties. This is no way to run a country. Infrastructure is a big deal when bridges fall down, when computer systems fail when you just can't make the systems do what they need to do.
If we were a poor country, that would be one thing. But I think that there's actually pretty good integrity in the elections itself themselves. And in Arizona where this sort of senate audit is going on, those ballots have been audited four times already. There are procedural safeguards from beginning to end. We are getting better at making those more universal which means that there's less opportunity for mistakes, let alone election fraud. Boxes of ballots that just get shoved in the corner don't get counted. Not because someone's trying to hide them, but because they're just in a messy room. I mean this is no good. And I think there's a lot of work on professionalizing the profession. And I think that's important because until you're in control of your work can't, until you're running a good election, you can't do the real work, which is supporting democracy a little. If you're in a company that sells something and you're being overwhelmed by tech support calls you can't get on to innovating or doing the next step because you're still catching up with the problems that are left over from that first version that was rushed into production without either making it technically perfect or understanding what users were gonna want.
Brendan Jarvis:
You touched on this briefly before. You sort mentioned that these institutions aren't really known for their love of change. And I understand in New York there's a problem with the instructions on the lever machines that took four sessions, which is eight years to resolve. Why do even seemingly simple and obvious issues that prevent people from correctly participating in democracy, why do these take so long to resolve
Whitney Quesenbery:
If I knew that I'd be President [laugh], I think it's, it's a big boat that turns slowly and I find this very frustrating. It wasn't lever machines. The situation I'm thinking about was paper ballots.
There was a huge number of over votes that as people who'd mistakenly voted twice in the same contest. And that disqualifies your vote in that contest coming from some deep precincts in the South Bronx. And I got involved with this sort as a design expert for some advocates and we did a bunch of work around this, but they kept saying, well, can this be right? And so they started looking not just for president, but they looked up and down the ballot and they saw really huge numbers, like the same mistake made over and over again. And one thing people started saying is, well, how do we know that people didn't just not understand how to vote, but no one let them look at the actual paper ballots, which had been carefully stored for just this purpose because they're not a public record. And so they couldn't gain access to them until it happened again.
And then finally someone did investigation and discovered that it was actually the scanner, the count, the tally machines that it was in an old school with weird power. And as the day wore on, they started misbehaving. And I think with what happened is this, the voter would go in, they'd put their ballot in, it would say, you've over wrote it. And they'd look at it and they'd say, this ballot is fine. And they'd put it in again, it would say you've over with. And they'd call over the poll worker and they'd all puzzle over this ballot. And the poll worker would say, well just press the button that says it's okay casted anyway. And I think their mental model was it went in a separate bin and someone would look at it later, but isn't what happened. And we're just I mean had it been within the margin of victory they would have, but it wasn't enough votes to make a difference.
And so no one looked at it. And so a group of people in an impoverished area of the South Bronx voted on machines that were counting their ballot. And Brennan Center for Justice did a looked at at some of this and discovered that there was in fact an overlay between socioeconomic status and over votes. And so you start to think about that the instructions on the back of the machines were based on the, over the old lever machines on the back of the ballots were based on the old lever machines, which were described in very fine detail in the law. And so it said that you should use the lever above and to the left, but we're now in a different place. The only saving grace was that were, it was written in six point type on the back of the ballot. No one actually read it so
Brendan Jarvis:
No one could read it.
Whitney Quesenbery:
Right. And it did finally get changed. The law did finally get resolved, but it came up, it passed the assembly the state assembly three or four times. And before it even was brought up in the Senate, and it was because the people who were in office, they got elected on the old rules. And everybody's always afraid of opening up the election law because they're afraid that something will get snuck in. They won't be good for them. And so there's a lot of suspicion around that. So getting people to think carefully about how and when you can revise election law and what should be in the law and what should be in regulation, it's a tough problem. But people think, well we're, we're gonna hash it out in this back room and we want all the ballots to say exactly the right thing. But even New York is beginning to change in August.
August is very late to do anything for November election. August is the day before the election because literally ballots have to be mailed about September something to overseas voters. They started talking about maybe they should update their envelopes. And we got called in and they thought, well, we'll just put out some templates that are slightly better and we'll see if anybody takes them up. But lots of things were happening. This is the middle of the pandemic. And Governor Cuomo signed an executive order that said that everybody, that there should be a uniform ballot envelope designed for all of New York state. Now that goes from the English only counties to the queens where they have to put five languages on the ballot, on the envelope. It's a lot of put on that real estate of an envelope. But we did, it was a lot of compromise that it is, the state board has a Democrat and a Republican. And even in that environment we got it done. And it was kind of astonishing. I mean, I've never seen elections move that fast and have it not break something.
These numbers are more shocking or not quite as shocking as they sound because when New York counts things, but in the primary New York City had pro said that 20 plus percent of the vo, no ballots they received has some defect and couldn't be counted [affirmative] on November 9th. So shortly after the November election the board of Elections tweeted out that their current status was that they had 4% of ballots that were about to be rejected, but over half of them and almost half of them had a problem that could be fixed. And we had a cure law and people could come and fix them. So that number was only gonna get better. So it went from 20% rejected ballots to 4% rejected ballots between June and November.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's huge. That's huge. Whitney, what a great thing for New York democracy
Whitney Quesenbery:
They're launching. Must
Brendan Jarvis:
Feel pretty good.
Whitney Quesenbery:
It does feel really great. And we've maintain a relationship with them. So we're launching rank choice voting. We were working with the, what's called the campaign finance word, but they do the voter education work and with common cause who were in advocates for this change and with the word of elections and working on doing research on how to explain this kind of complicated way of voting. Anybody from Australia, we know it's not that complicated, but it feels complicated here. But how to explain it. And one of the things that we kept saying is you guys have to use all the same words, right? Because you can't describe it in different ways. People get suspicious, they don't know why it's different and they've kind of adopted that and they're amazingly they are working well. I don't know if they're working together, but they're at least focused on being consistent in the message. And that's such a huge shift. And it's because they have a high profile election coming up and it's gonna be for their boss, right? The mayor [laugh]. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
And it's an exceedingly measurable outcome that you're able to deliver through these UX improvements to how people vote. It is really fantastic to hear you've been able to affect that change. So thinking about where civic design in the United States is currently and the work that you've been doing to get it to that place, what is your greatest hope over the coming years for where it might go?
Whitney Quesenbery:
I would love for every government office, especially every election office to start with, but really every government office and to be thinking about how they're presenting the information and the interactions that they manage. I, I'd love to see them having some really good guidelines to following guidelines so that they're thinking about what that experience is and considering that part of their job. I'd love to have some real training. You mentioned that in the introduction that we teach the election design course and part of the certificate and election administration. And it's great, we're just finishing a semester of it. We had two Secretary of State people from the Secretary of State's office, two people from the state level, two people from county offices, and a bunch of people who wanna grow up to be election officials and some advocates all working together and thinking about, we make them do usability tests, we make them try to rewrite things, we make them experiment with things.
It's very hands on, very, it's a remote class but it's very studio ish and they may never be great designers, but they will have some idea that there is great design and they will have the ability to recognize good design when they see it and the desire to want it. And I think that will lead to things like hiring a digital communications manager who knows how to make websites and social media work, who knows how to use all the language of design to communicate. And so my hope is that it becomes just an obvious skill that every office is gonna have or have access to. And
Brendan Jarvis:
If people are listening from those offices to this episode, then I believe you have on your website the Center's website, you've got some excellent field guides for ensuring voter intent that they're able to download.
Whitney Quesenbery:
We do. And actually they exist in paper form [affirmative] we think they've been successful because they're just so darn cute. [laugh] like 10 tips all illustrated what's behind them is a big heap of research in every case. Not always our research, somebody's research and we have a name for a big pile of really good meaty research reports. We call 'em a door stop, [laugh]. Cause they get put in the pile, the goat pile, they don't get red. And so we started writing briefs. Dana came up with the idea of these little scout books, [affirmative]. And it's not everything to know about design usable welds or accessible. It's sort of the 10 things you can do that will make a difference. And so we think it's about building up those habits. If you can get into the little habits can then next year you can use a bigger habit. Cuz the nice thing about government elections is they just keep on going. There's always another election. So you can try something. In fact, we urge, urge not to do things that are too big at once. [affirmative] to build it up over time. Serious, serious little changes. Try it out with voters, make sure you're right and to make that basic decent design what we expect things to look like.
Brendan Jarvis:
My last question, which is an incredibly serious one and something that happens in most countries, in fact, not just democracy, is more often than elections is needing to pay one's taxes. [affirmative]. Can we ever make that a delightful experience?
Whitney Quesenbery:
Sure, why not? I mean one way you could do it is by making it it less complicated. In the UK for instance, most average wage earners don't file taxes at all cuz they've done pay as you go, pay as urine, right? [affirmative]? Yeah. No, the IRS tries and state tries. But I think we have a long way to go cuz of our fragmented system cuz every state does its own thing. So I don't know about taxes
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Well Whitney, I have no doubt if you keep doing what you're doing, that may be something that one day that people in the United States can hope to enjoy. Whitney, this has been a hugely valuable and interesting conversation. I've learned a lot and I'm sure the people that have been listening to this will have also thank you for so generously sharing your experience and your insights today.
Whitney Quesenbery:
Well thanks. Those were great questions I made me think so that was fun.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] most welcome and thank you also Whitney, for your outstanding and continued contribution to the field of UX over the past 30 also years.
Whitney Quesenbery:
Well thank you. It's nice to have survived this long
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Whitney, if people wanna find out more about what you and the center do and the things that you're up to, what is the best way for them to do that?
Whitney Quesenbery:
Our website, it's civicdesign.org. We do have a newsletter. It is, I will confess up front, it's mainly, and for election departments are all tips for election design, [affirmative], but they're fun. We publish everything out in the open. So there's a lot of stuff there to look through and a lot of research papers and a lot of sample designs and things so that if you're in the US we run a list we call the irregulars, which are people who would like maybe to hear about opportunities to either volunteer or work in elections. Sometimes we post other jobs in government cuz it seems like too good an opportunity to pass up. So that's a little bit of a community. And look, besides us, there's a lot of communities growing up. So I wanna take it one step beyond what we do, which is that in a lot of cities there are groups of people that meet to do civic tech design in New York, it's called Beta NYC [affirmative]. And those are great communities to be part of. So you can do good and excellent things. And the last thing is to say especially if you're not in a big city walk into your election office and say, hi, I have some skills and I would love to help you with them with elections.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thanks, Whitney. That's really important point and call to action for the designers and the UXers out there that are listening that they can actually contribute and make a difference to civic design. Yeah, really great. And so everyone that's been listening, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that Whitney and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Whitney in the Center for Civic Design plus any of the other resources that we've mentioned. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX design and product, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe. And until next time, keep being brave.

Whitney Quesenbery

Strengthening Democracy Through Design

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