The UK culture secretary has fanned an old flame: PG/PG-13/R style ratings for websites. It’s an old idea, one some of you may know I had some involvement with back in the day. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the first browser to support PICS, a W3C standard system for allowing websites to be rated, and I was the PM for the IE team that built the feature.

The thing never took off, which most of me thinks is a good thing. However it did help in some way to prevent the Communications Decency Act from being enforced, and possibly influencing the 2003 decision to remove the indecency provisions from the Act.

PICS makes for a great study in the challenges of public policy, technology and censorship. The coolest concept it had was the ability for any rating system to be used, and for anyone to create one, dodging the entire problem of defining obscenity, good, bad or anything. It was a meta rating system: a system for creating and using rating systems, and tools for parents or administrators to decide how many systems to use and what permissions were allowed. But that was also the Achilles heel: there was never anything to market to parents. And when we did put one of the PICS supporting systems in the box called RSACi, a system designed by Stanford professors, it confused the issue on what PICS was, what Microsoft was doing and who these RSACi folks were. The only system everyone know was the movie system, and that was really all they wanted to see.

More problematic, no solution was offered for how to rate a zillion websites, or a zillion websites with a thousand pages. There was no real business in making a web rating system.

Worst of all, the project was an easy target for censorship and Orwellian nightmare fantasies (Lawrence Lessig wrote “Pics is the Devil”, Wired 5.07). It all turned out to be moot: few even remember what PICS was, much less use it. I’m not saying those fears were unwarranted, but the idea died for reasons that had little to do with what folks were so worried about. Here’s a good summary of the whole is PICS censorship question, written by one of the folks who wrote the PICS Spec.

PICS also makes an excellent case study in the history of innovation. The technology of PICS was truly novel and at minimum an interesting approach to a difficult, subjective, and highly charged problem. But it also divided people sharply, created new problems, had major flaws, and took on big risks, all factors in most innovations, successful or not.

And of course, in my entire experience with the whole world of parental controls and censorship, the funny thing was people rarely ever talked about the neighbor’s kid theory. It goes like this: who cares what you do as a parent if when your Johnny goes over to his friend Fred’s house, Fred being the child of parents who didn’t bother to install whatever magic software you do, they go to whatever websites they like. Kids are exceptional at figuring out which friend’s parents have the most lenient rules. They’re also always better at hacking new technologies than their parents are. It’s all running up a steep hill if you asked me. Technology doesn’t seem to be the solution here. (I do realize the “neighbor’s kid theory” doesn’t apply if the blocking takes place at the government level).

Anyway, there’s a ton of history in this story and lots to learn. And don’t get me started on the problems with the USA PG/PG-13/R/X system, oh boy does that have some problems. Anyway, it’s a shame none of it gets mentioned by the Telegraph. I’m sure this issue will come up every few years from now until forever.

See also:

• ESRB: The U.S. system for rating video games.
• MPAA: The U.S. Movie rating system. (And Roger Ebert’s excellent criticism of it).

Posted in Innovation, politics, pop culture | 6 Comments »

A curiosity of the recent coverage of the $50 billion Madoff scandal is the sense of shock and surprise that professional investors make big, possibly illegal, mistakes in 2008. The same year half our banks fell apart, major investment firms went bankrupt, automobile companies beg for money, and governors offer to sell senate seats for cash.

In times like these a book gets mentioned by some experts called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the madness of crowds. It’s a big fat book chronicling the silly, absurd things large groups of people have bet their money on and lost. Some read the book to feel smart smart that we ourselves didn’t do any of the stupid things our ancestors did. But these days an update to the book is well overdue: an entire chapter can be written about the delusional wonders of 2008.

I’m left with this opinion: there will always be pyramid schemes, frauds and market collapses. It’s inherent in complex systems, things like democracies, free-markets and blogospheres, that these things will happen. Unavoidable actually. I’m not saying we should accept them or not try to reduce their number and impact (hello, SEC, where have you been?), but they will always take place. The reason? Trust.

A pyramid scheme, often referred to as a ponzi scheme, is well defined by wikipedia as an unsustainable business model, where the people who invest are not aware of how unsustainable it is. (In a ponzi scheme, victims are mostly just out of luck, in a pyramid scheme, victims are often part of the crime since they promoted the pyramid).

As the story goes the legendary Charles Ponzi told his potential investors in 1919 he could return 40% on their money in 45 days. FORTY PERCENT. At a time when the interest rates hovered around 5%. Why was he able to get their money on such a ridiculous promise? For one reason: they trusted him. That’s it. He found a way to earn their trust. The details don’t matter for the moment. Lets ask what is trust?

Trust is using what you know about someone to compensate for what you do not know. I trust my brother. I’d trust him to, I don’t know, say, watch my dogs. Now once he has my dogs I can’t be 100% certain what he might do when he watches them. He might decide to cover them with chocolate syrup, or set them loose in the meat section of my local supermarket, I can’t prevent him from doing these things. But I trust he won’t.

Similarly you trust the staff at McDonald’s not to spit in your food, the woman behind you at line in the bank not to make silly faces at the back of your head, or the gas you pump into your car to be actual gasoline and not turpentine. Our daily lives hinge on trusting all sorts of things we are too ignorant or busy to verify. And from time to time some people will take advantage of this trust because they are mean and because they can. It might only happen 1 or 2% of the time. Small enough not to make us stop trusting these things. But fraud, abuse, and pyramid schemes will always exist as long as we are free to choose who to give our trust to. Laws penalize people after they betray our trust, not before.

Look at the list of people whose trust was betrayed by Madoff: Steven Spielberg; Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.); New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, fashion mogul, Carl Shapiro; real-estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman; the European bank HSBC; and on it goes. These high powered people, despite their teams of lawyers and advisers had their trust betrayed. It’s sad and shameful what happened, especially since many of their funds were tied to charities, but there’s nothing we can do to permanently prevent this from happening again. To hire someone to manage your money will always be based primarily on the wonderfully imperfect, intuition dependent, amazingly tricky thing called trust.

How do you decide who to trust? All I know is after writing this post, I’m looking at everyone I see with a suspicious eye :)

Posted in philosophy, politics, pop culture | 11 Comments »

All this talk of bailouts over the last few weeks, and now the talk of bailouts for the major U.S. automakers, makes me think of one of the lessons regarding Christensen’s Innovator’s dilemma.

One of the excellent points Christensen makes is that successful companies, so invested in the ideas that made them successful, invest in old ideas despite evidence they’re no longer viable. This explains why WordPerfect resisted making a Windows version of their best selling word processor, why Microsoft initially resisted investing in the Internet, and why dozens of once market leading companies fell off the map.

So when I hear talk of bailouts of failing organizations, particularly auto manufacturers, I can’t help but see it as an innovators dilemma type problem. By investing in an old idea, and the old guard of the U.S. auto industry, we slow the next wave of change from happening. We enable thousands of people to believe their old ways and skills are still viable, instead of motivating them to seek out new skills, products, or roles that have a chance at thriving in this decade and the next.

When you’ve been successful with an idea for years, an idea you’ve put your life into, its hard to recognize it’s time to pull the plug. Odds are high you’ll need someone else to pull the plug for you. Like in that cliched scene in a zillion medical shows when the heroic doctor refuses to stop giving CPR to a favorite patient, someone has to tap you on the shoulder and say “Hey. It’s over. Time to move on.”

If it were not for the larger financial crisis I doubt there would be much support for auto bailout plans. Chapter 11 can work quite well. It was the primary system used to resolve the collapse of the U.S. Steel industry in the 1970s. Pittsburgh survived, and with 15 years began to thrive, in much the same way Detroit might. It won’t be fun, but needed changes rarely are.

$25 billion to hold on to the past is guaranteed to return less on that investment than $25 billion spent to pave the way for the future.

Posted in Innovation, politics | 8 Comments »

Found this nice op-ed piece this morning called What’s so special about a team of rivals, By James Oakes. It’s the perfect antidote to the sloppy thinking circling the now cliched phrase ‘team of rivals’.

Another nice observation I heard on NPR last night was that every cabinet choice leaves the half dozen candidates you didn’t pick miffed with you. And if you pick the rival, there is some powerful candidate within your party or staff who will never view you in the same way again. All choices have opportunity cost and there’s no perfect way to select something as complex as a cabinet.

I confess I haven’t read Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals. And I do buy the nugget of the theory that selecting people who have diverse opinions, even in some cases opposing ones, can be a useful force if the energy of those tensions can be converted into the positive: better decisions or better policies. But to do that means picking very special kinds of rivals. Rivals with whom intelligent discourse and deep trust are possible, which is very hard to find.

Posted in Management, politics | 2 Comments »

At UI13 I had the chance to chat with Dana Chisnell of usabilityworks.net, who has been working on ballot design and usability for the last few years. She agreed to answer some questions about what’s happened since 2000 and 2004, and what we should expect from ballot designs this week.

SB. What is the state of the art in ballot design? Which states have done the best job of learning from Florida? Which states have done the worst?

DC: The state of the art in ballot design is in a beautiful document published by the US Election Assistance Commission called Effective Designs for the Administration of Federal Elections (PDF). It includes detailed design specifications for printed ballots of various types, all based on user research and usability testing. It’s available for free here:

The objection that states and counties have to the designs in the EAC report is that they pay no attention to cost. For example, the report recommends using 2 colors (usually black and blue), but adding color is expensive. Also, making the type larger or opening up the layout of printed ballots often means making the ballot cards longer, flowing over onto the back side of a ballot card, or printing more cards. The printing is expensive, and with more voting by mail, the postage costs go up.

Several states have implemented as many of the best practices as is practical. Oregon — where all voting is by mail — was on the forefront. But other states such as Nebraska have embraced the guidelines. Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist took as one of his first acts after he was elected to warehouse all of the electronic voting machines and forced all the counties to go to printed ballots after the November 2006 election. One of the drivers to that change was a huge undervote in congressional district 13 (Sarasota and Charlotte counties) in 2006. Typically, between 1 and 5 percent of voters don’t vote on any particular race in any given election. But in that election, somewhere between 11 and 15 percent of voters did not vote for a representative to Congress. There weren’t any security issues. The programming was fine. It all comes down to a ballot design problem.

There are still serious problems with ballot design, though. Ohio’s secretary of state sent out a ballot template that included one best practice — putting the instructions in the top left of the ballot card — but then split the presidential race across two columns. We know from previous elections that people either don’t vote for candidates in the space under the instructions, or they overvote by voting for someone in the first column and in the second column, which would mean than neither counts.

A few places have started conducting usability tests of ballots before they’re printed or loaded into voting systems: Sarasota and Duvall counties in Florida; Los Angeles County; Marin County, California; Clark County (Las Vegas), Nevada; and the state of New Hampshire. I take this as a sign that there is hope for the world.

SB. Typically whose job is it to actually design local and state election ballots? Is there any training required to do this job?

It’s different in different places. In many states, the secretary of state issues a ballot template. But it always comes down to local election officials at the county level to implement the design. Often the local election official outsources the actual layout to a vendor or to the manufacturer of their voting systems because the layout software is wicked hard to use.

There are lots of layers of training. The first is to know intimately the election statutes for the county and the state. It seems whacky, but in most places things like type size, capitalization, and the language of instructions are all defined in a law. The number of languages that ballots must be available in is also legislated.

Next, you have to know the constraints of the voting system you’re using. For example, if your county uses an optical scan system — the type where the voter fills in bubbles or connects the ends of arrows — the choices on the ballot must line up with tick marks or registration marks on the edges of the cards, which definitely constrains leading or line height.

Finally, there are dozens of different types of districts in every county. Where you live in Washington State, there are hundreds of combinations of local districts: school, water, cemetery, conservation — the list goes on. So there can be hundreds of variations of ballots within a state or county (if it’s big enough). A given county could issue one ballot for all or as many as 300 variations on a basic ballot because of the different district combinations.

But to answer your original question, there’s usually one person in the county who is responsible for the design of the ballot. And then a few other people do reviews. Usability testing is a really new, new thing in the world of elections.

SB. How difficult has it been to get legislators and politicians to understand the value of design and usability? What tactics have worked best? Has this been different in your experience than working with business executives?

Some of the problems are the same in the public and private sectors. How do I fit this into my already-tight election cycle? How do I get design and usability for free (or for cheap)? What if there are hideous things that I don’t have time to fix?

In the end, it comes down to two things: a) the possibility of getting bad press; and b) how much will it cost if something goes wrong and we have to do recounts (which usually also involve multiple law suits).

As a reaction to the “butterfly” ballots used in the 2000 general election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which mandated replacing old voting systems. Most of the new systems were electronic voting systems with touchscreens. Local elections officials loved this idea. It was thought that computers would be safe and reliable. Soon the discussion was hijacked by security concerns. The original problem — ballot design — is still being addressed and solved.

It’s as if legislators have had to learn the hard way. We’ve just been running one gigantic live usability test over the last eight years. As problems are more closely identified and eliminated, the more nuanced things come to the fore.

It all matters these days because elections are so close. When the margins were wider, there was much more room for error in design. Now, not so much.

SB. What is your opinion of electronic voting? Does it solve any of the important problems we have?

Advocates for people with disabilities like electronic voting very much. And there are a lot of good things about electronic voting for people with disabilities. It is *amazing* to hear stories from people who have never been able to vote independently before talk about marking and casting their own ballots.

BUT from a design point of view, I think that some of the problems are multiplied. For example, not only do you have to consider type face and size, color, line length and height in the visual design, but now you also have to deal with navigation and interaction issues that just don’t exist on the paper versions, as well as error messages and instructions for using the user interface. For example, on most electronic voting machines, to change a selection a voter must deselect the choice already made before she can make a new selection. There are good reasons for doing it this way, but it isn’t conventional (no ATM or ticket kiosk works that way) and there are no instructions on the screen.

SB. Have you examined how other counties design their ballots? Where does the U.S. rank in terms of ballot usability?

The US has some very special problems. In other countries, the whole country votes on the same ballot. Unless there is a referendum, there are rarely questions or propositions on the ballots. So it’s easy to be consistent from location to location.

But other countries have to deal with things we don’t normally think about in the US, such as low literacy. In India, Africa, and South America, ballots have pictures of the candidates on them or symbols for the parties or both. In those places, they also have to be concerned with bandits or terrorists forcing people in far off, rural precincts to vote the way the bandits want them to vote. So there are panic features of the voting systems that allow them to be shut down and secured easily.

SB: What can designers and usability experts do to help support improving ballots in the future?

Sign up to be poll workers. It is estimated that 2 million poll workers will be needed for the election on November 4. There’s nothing like observing real people use a design in real time. Take note of the types of questions voters ask.

Sign up to be a temporary worker counting ballots or doing canvasses after the election. If the jurisdiction used paper ballots, you’ll be able to see post hoc how voters marked them (the variety is amazing).

Learn everything you can about ballot design issues. I’ve included one link to the Effective Designs report above. The Usability Professionals’ Association also sponsors a Usability in Civic Life project that works on ballot usability and accessibility issues and maintains a blog about issues and findings. There are also some interesting reports from research conducted by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology at vote.nist.gov, not to mention hundreds of blogs about voting, election administration, voting system security, and so on.

Visit your local election department (but wait until December or after). Ask for a tour. Interview the election director. Volunteer your time to do small things, like a day of asking people who show up at town hall for other things to vote a ballot that is in the design process while you observe them. Show people voting instructions and ask them to circle or highlight anything that isn’t clear or that they have questions about. That sort of thing.

SB. For fun: in all the usability studies you’ve run regarding voting, what’s the most tragic failure you’ve seen by an ordinary citizen in a voting booth?

Voting a completely empty ballot on an electronic machine because the touches on the screen did not register. When we asked the participant how confident she was that she voted as she intended, she said she was very confident. When we asked her if she had noticed that the things she touched on the screen did not change color (as the instructions said they would, as she had read aloud to us), she said, “That’s the way computers work.”

Posted in Design, politics | 4 Comments »

This is what politics is to me. Someone tells you all the trees on your street have a disease. One side says give them food and water and everything will be fine. One side says chop them down and burn them so they don’t infect another street. That’s politics. And I’m going, Who says they’re diseased? And how does this sickness manifest itself? And is this outside of a natural cycle? And who said this again? And when were they on this street? But we just have people who shout, “Chop it down and burn it” or “Give it food and water” and there’s your two choices. Sorry, I’m not a believer.

- John Malkovich, Esquire Magazine, Nov 2008

Posted in politics, quote of the x | 4 Comments »

Probably the best single website for explanations, background and summaries on what happened, what it means, what might happened next. Includes comparisons to previous crises.

The Money Meltdown.

Posted in politics | 2 Comments »

With the first debate tonight (9pm EST), here’s the requisite list of drinking games:

Metafliters list of presidential debate drinking games

Have fun. I’ll be keeping track of any uses of the word innovation :)

Posted in politics | 1 Comment »

I can’t say how accurate this thing is, but it’s both a great piece of design (By Terry Colon, formerly of Suck), and a polarizing commentary on immigration policy: this will either anger you or make you happy. I know for sure my great grandparents would never have made it through this - Instead of being here writing this, I, like they were, would probably be a peasant farmer somewhere in Eastern Europe.

And here’s the blog post it comes from with it’s own comment thread (Hat tip, metafilter)

What I’d like to see are: 1) similar flowcharts for other first world countries. 2) Similar flowcharts for 50, 100, and 150 years ago in the U.S.

Posted in Design, politics | 1 Comment »

45 days to go. We’ve got wars, bailouts, and natural disaster zones galore. What’s the best way to decide how to vote? Here’s my take on advice for how to pick a president in 1400 words.

Essay #59 - How to pick a president.

Posted in history, politics | 5 Comments »