[Sigia-l] ballot usability redux

[Jared M. Spool]

At 11:13 PM 8/10/2003 -0400, James Spahr wrote:
>I just could not believe that random order would be the preferred method 
>of ordering names. I'd really love to see the history of that spectacular 
>decision, and the arguments against alphabetical listings -- I can see why 
>some people might think alphabetical listings would put some canidates at 
>a disadvantage -- but that really would be assuming your users are morons ...
>
>I wonder if any studies were done.

Actually, there have been. alphabetical listings and random order perform 
almost identically in most cases. David Fay and co. at Verizon Research 
have done a tremendous amount of work in Yellow Pages, finding that names 
listed at the top of the list have a significantly greater chance of being 
chosen than names at the bottom.

If the great state of California were really interested in making the list 
perform without any order bias, they'd make each ballot have it's own 
randomly unique order. (The beauty of 193 factorial is that it's a *really 
large number*.)

Maybe there should be a box on the ballot that says "I don't care. Just 
pick for me".

Jared


Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
http://www.uie.com    jspool at uie.com

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