Humans in Design

Keep the Spirit of Cash Alive

Sat, 26 May 2012 12:32:37 +1000

It’s true, Humans in Design has money on the mind. We’re really proud to have been featured on an awesome episode of 99% Invisible talking about the differences between American and Australian currency design. It’s something I’m so interested in that I even got a tattoo of it.

But we also know that David Wolman is right, and the use of physical currency is diminishing, soon to be primarily in the domain of retro-loving hipsters. We had this in mind when we prepared our talk at Next Bank Asia. In our talk preview, we wrote about how banks can ease customers into new ways of thinking through gradual change that doesn’t diminish the value of old systems.

Banks have already done this with credit card and ATM transactions, but the next big domain to conquer is mobile banking. Too many banking applications are just facsimiles of bad paper statements — forensic lists of transactions that are only useful if a user is trying to figure out what went wrong. Instead, banking apps should be tools that users can use to plan for a stable future.

Using a lot of the same principles we applied in our still-popular mortgage statement redesign, we designed a banking app that we would actually want to use. It’s just an image prototype, but we still think it’s great:

First, we wanted to give customers a proportional representation that shows how their money and debts are distributed. Names and amounts are big, and useful for what we think would be the most common scenario — “Is there enough money in my account for this.”

Tapping on one of the accounts brings a page that shows the customer how much has been both deposited and withdrawn from the account in a given time period. For the sake of this example, we used a week but ideally the customer would be able to choose a unit that fits their needs — fortnights, days, months, etc.

We also included a graph that shows the year-to-date history of the account and a projection toward a user-defined goal. In this example we showed an upward trajectory on a spending account, and a debt account like a mortgage or auto loan would use a graph similar to the one int our mortgage statement redesign.

When it comes to making a transaction, we wanted to replicate that tactile feeling of cash; the feeling that actual objects are moving from one party to another. We talked about the playful quality of games like Monopoly or Life and how one of the appealing aspects of those games is the physical movement of money from one player to another. We imitated this mechanic by animating banknotes moving out of the sender’s account when a transaction is completed. For this example, we made the bank notes in the shape of American currency, but with the colours of Australian currency. In practice, the animated currency should change to look like the currency of the country the user is in.

The recipient would get a push notification…

…And would see an animation of the same bank notes entering their account and their amounts being updated. This takes the transaction from digits on a screen to something that feels real.

We think the first banks to make truly innovative mobile applications will see a huge increase in customers, and a big improvement in stability for customers using the application. They may not make as much on overdraft or late payment fees, but that will just allow them to make money on bigger transactions.

It’s also important for banks to work together on a universal set of standards for banking applications. It’s still too hard to transfer money between two banks, and smaller community banks and credit unions often don’t have the resources or user base to justify developing an app on their own. Banks have come together on a standard for credit and debit card number processing; they should do the same for mobile transactions.

-Tom (@tmnlsn)

Humans in the Design of Yellow Lines

Fri, 25 May 2012 09:31:00 +1000

A little while back, I blogged my observations on the effectiveness of a yellow “do not cross” line at Helsinki Airport. The line worked for awhile:

Until it didn’t:

I compared this to previous broken windows studies which we’ve reported - In short, in small social situations a rule works, until other start to break it. Then we all break it.

In response to this we received an excellent post in the comments below from Ali Robertson talking about the yellow ‘do not cross’ lines at a train station from Melbourne, Australia. His observations was that the texture of line seemed to matter:

“In Melbourne, Australia, we had something like this at train stations. The solution was to actually use rubber studs in the floor to texture the ground very differently, and provide multiple threshholds for people to ‘break through’. This was done at pretty much every station. I’ve attached a couple of images of a crowded platform 7 at Flinders street station… One from the 1920s, and one from 2007. Note the distance people now maintain from the edge - this is not due to any signs or announcements.”

1920s Melbourne Train Platform - Crowds huddle close to the track.

2007 Melbourne Train Platform - Textures seem to move people away from the track.

I had actually made the same observations as Ali. He just beat me to the punch! The below is my comment response:

“I have actually taken photos of this in a number examples of just this point and intended to blog about it.

I believe (though I have not confirmed this) that these studs are actually for the visually impaired.

However, they definitely seem to work to provide a tactile barrier. My post was going to be if this was an unintended side-effect of a design change - I was going to try and coin this ‘unintended affordance’.

Do you know I’m incorrect that it’s unintended?

Thanks so much for the comment and pics.”

Here are some of the pics I have been collecting:

2011 London Tube Platform - Textures seem to move people away from the track.

2012 NYC Subway - Standing on the textures made me feel I was too close.

Well it turns out I was right.

These raised, dome-shaped studs are technically part of a method called tactile paving or Tactile Ground Surface Indicators. These studs can be detected by a white cane, a service animal, or even by standing or walking on them.

Various disability discrimination acts require that train platform edges and other pedestrian hazards such as stairs, curbs and ramps.

Ramp with Tactile Paving in New York City

Stairs With Tactile Paving in New Zealand

The method was first introduced in 1967 to Okayama City, Japan. And, at least from a google image search, they’re still leading the charge today.

Japanese Subway including textures/shapes to indicate locations.

The bumps don’t make it impossible for stand in a hazardous or high-traffic place, but they make it much more pleasant to stand somewhere else - a nudge if you will.

It’s another example of how inclusive design is not only better for the persons who rely on it. It’s better for everyone.

It can even be beautiful:

Beautiful use in Japan, leading the vision impaired around a manhole.

-Tristan

@humansindesign

Humans in the Design of Door Handles

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:58:22 +1000

As a ‘human factors’ guy, one thing that bugs me about the interaction design community is a feeling that they created the concept of intuitive design.

Many assume that usability started at Xerox PARC or with Jonathan Grudin, but intuitive design was not created with electronic technology such as web pages and mobile apps.

Designers have always used shape, orientation, color, texture, context - you name it - to speak to users. Almost everything, from a cathedral to a typewriter was designed with intended uses and outcomes based on human behavior.

The best designs speak without words.

Physically, intentionally, or otherwise.

Door handles speak to us every day. They say two things:

Touch me like this.

The door opens this way.

Here is a great example I found. The first handle says “grasp me with you hand horizontally and pull back”. The second “stick your fingers in me and pull sideways”.*

The first time, it took two people, two minutes to figure out how to open it unlocked.

Those of us with dinosaur titles like ‘human factors engineers’ and ‘ergonomist’ were part of early professions that first tried observe tasks, code and catalogue behaviours into languages and use the codes to make observable improvements.

User-centred design did not start with iPhones, webpages or even computers. It’s in all the technology around us.

Arguably, the first attempt to systematically use observation to design for the user started with the laying of some humble bricks:

-Tristan

Next Steps for Banks

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:31:00 +1000

We’re excited and honored to be speakers at Next Bank Asia in Singapore in a couple of weeks. Our talk will build on our still-popular mortgage statement redesign. We’ll deal with how banks can make both their paper statements and mobile applications into tools that customers want to use. Here’s a taste of what we’ll say:

“Every month when I get my mortgage bill I’m overwhelmed. The information is so dense and so flat that my eyes glaze over. They’re so boring that I’ve stopped opening them, and my junk drawer is filling up. Each new statement comes with a feeling of contempt and detachment, and I know I’m not the only one who has this problem.” — Tristan

On the surface, bank statements are there to meet a legal requirement — a list of transactions with a sum at the end. Over time, banks have added some other elements (like graphs) to show customers how much they’ve “saved”. It’s an attempt at emotional design, but fails to actually make people feel better about the product. It feels like what it is: marketing.

In the best cases, customers ignore this stuff. At worst, it perceived as condescending. Informed customers are aware that this discount is imaginary.

But either way, the current bank statement is not useful. These statements only tell customers about the past when they should be helping people plan for the future.

A bank’s goal should be to actively communicate with customers to help them make informed decisions; we want to increase awareness and engagement with financial data.

This is different than financial literacy - it’s not about making people understand finances, which has been proved ineffective. It’s about making sure the right information is available at the right time.

We want this information to be available for all sorts of decisions, from the big (like refinancing a house) to everyday choices (like whether to buy a new pair of shoes). So we have to find out where people are making decisions and give them tools instead of junk mail.

If financial literacy is learning how to read traffic signs, then were about putting those signs up in the places where they should be.

So why bother with the bank statement? Aren’t paper bills on their way out anyway?

Yes, but mortgages are important and what we have to work with today are paper bills. Unfortunately, too many online banking systems are simple facsimiles of paper statements. So get rid of them, right?

Well, jumping to a new system may jarring to customers who have had a lifetime of boring bank statements. Some will make the leap, but for if you make the step too far many will fail to follow. Banks should ease their customers into new tools by creating a journey.

Banks have done this before. Think of the journey from cash online transactions. If you’d have asked people to make that jump directly, many people wouldn’t have felt comfortable going from something that is physical to numbers on a screen.

The first step was ATM card in customers’ wallets. It took customers some time to get used to to getting cash from a machine instead of from a person, but that new comfort prepared customers for the next step — credit and debit cards at shops and restaurants. Customers were making purchasable at same points, but without physical cash.

After that, customers were ready to make purchases online. Now customers are perhaps even more comfortable dealing when electronic transactions than cash.

It’s a unified system that’s good for customers and good for banks. But the journey isn’t over — near field communication transactions will soon be available on most cell phones.

This ease-in method isn’t limited to the financial industry. The 2010s saw a down-and-out company ease us from iPods to Macs to iPhones to iPads to iClouds.

To get to a big goal we can’t just focus on the endpoint; we must create a journey, starting with a first step. For banks, this is the paper statement.

Bank statements are ephemeral, and they’ve been adapted to meet technological advances in payments and processing. However, paper has remained the optimal medium for statements until about five years ago. Now, users have digital tools rich in customisable, graphical data. Users can see their past and evaluate their present situation. Most importantly, they can easily explore the effect of future decisions and plan accordingly.

However, like the iCloud or mobile phone payments, this jump is too big for many users to make in a single bound. We need multiple steps before a customer is comfortable using digital graphs to understand their financial situation.

We began thinking about these changed when we took Tristan’s boring mortgage statement and prototyped a more engaging experience, where customers can plan for a variation in how much they pay each fortnight, and anticipate how interest rates might change.

We imagine customers choosing these variables at the start of their loans, but being able to adjust them later on. The graphs we made for this prototype wouldn’t be right for everyone, but customisable modules could comprise the right combination for many users. Then, when these graphs start appearing online, customers will already feel familiar with them.

But why would banks want to do this?

All this sounds great for the customer, but we believe that it’s also better for banks, too. On a purely superficial level, transparency is great marketing. Customers like honest companies, who acknowledge when things are tough, and try to make them better.

The first bank to make things better will undoubtedly win customers for years to come. In bank language, this is the reverse of ‘reputation risk’, which is the pillar of new holistic bank risk management strategies.

We all know that banks are having a reputation crisis, especially after the GFC, for using and abusing customers. A lot of banks are using huge advertising campaigns to improve their images, but helping people be more personally in control of their money means that customers will be happier with their allocation of funds.

They’ll be ‘wealthier’ with the same amount of spending, because they use the money more efficiently instead of wasting it. We are seeing this with the growth of companies like Movenbank and Simple.

Even if customers pay off their loans faster because of a system like this, it just opens that customer up to make a new loan, likely with the bank that already made them happy, or refer their family. The width of the slice might be smaller, but it could be of a bigger pie.

It might start with just a paper statement, but this is a road leads to happy, stable customers. If banks misstep their customers might be left behind - or with other banks. We’re sure that the first user-centred bank to make the journey will have a hoard of customers going with them.

I came to Australia in 2010 to get a Master’s Degree in...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:01:49 +1000

I came to Australia in 2010 to get a Master’s Degree in interaction design at the University of Queensland. In a happy coincidence I ended up working with Tristan here on Humans in Design. But my degree is finished (and my visa is expiring) so it’s time for me to go back to America.

One of my favorite Humans in Design posts was the one I wrote last December about the design of Australian currency. In fact, I like the design of the money here so much that I decided to get a tattoo in the shape of Australia’s 50 cent coin — a dodecagon.

The 50 cent coin is also a nice example of iterative design. The coin was originally circular, but in 1966 the Royal Australian Mint changed to the current shape to reduce confusion with the 20 cent coin for blind and sighted people alike. You can feel the difference between 20 and 50 cent coins in your pocket, and that’s what makes it a great design. You can only see the shape in my tattoo, but it’s still a great reminder of the time I’ve spent in Australia without being an upsetting cliche.

And don’t worry. Even though I’ll be in another country, but Tristan and I have a lot of great ideas coming up.

-Tom

Humans in the Design of Festival Timetables

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:51:00 +1000

Okay, so I am going to Laneway in Brisbane. For those who don’t live in Australia, Laneway is a music festival that tours major Australian cities including Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne.

The lineup is always pretty great for me. But, at times, the way they’ve organised things has been a bit of a letdown. A lot of people complain about it — my ears pricked up when a friend complained about the design of the Laneway timetable:

He took some time to figure out his favourite bands were clashing:

Others complained of the same problem, and soon the discussion extended. One commenter ended up making her own timetable last year:

Festival organisers originally had two methods for giving timetables. First was a straight list which, as Tom Slater found out, took time to understand and see which bands clashed. The second was to create an account and select the bands you want to see and get a personalised timetable.

Both methods are terrible. You don’t just use band names to plan your day. You want to know three things:

1. What bands are playing

2. Which times they are playing and for how long

3. Which stages are they playing at.

And it would be good to have all this information for all bands, not just the ones you selected, at the same time including at the festival. Why all this information? It helps you plan your day and change plans if you have any issues.

But I don’t believe in whining without having a better solution. So we decided to make a better timetable; one that is visually easy to understand the bands, times and stages.

Just as we were about ready to release our timetable, Laneway released a pdf version. On first glance we thought it looked okay, and were somewhat annoyed ours would be redundant… but closer inspection revealed that the timetable still has issues.

Mainly, this is caused by rows seeming to represent clashing time chunks. Visually, the bands in the same row feel like they are on at the same time even when some sets actually only have five minutes of overlap.

For example, in the below image some bands are on different rows but actually on at very overlapping times.

You also get the reverse – bands in the same row that don’t clash. For example, the Cults seem to clash with the Panics, but the only overlap by 5 minutes. You could probably see most of both, if that’s what you liked.

So we made a better timetable. Our improved features include:

The size of the box that the band is in accurately reflects when they are playing, and for how long.
The design allows visual scanning to see clashes.
It’s easier to highlight your favourite bands.

Here you go!

Brisbane

Sydney

Melbourne

And by popular demand, Auckland

A couple of pro-tips:

Make sure you SAVE the timetables to your computer and print them from there. Our test prints did some weird things when printing directly from browsers.
If you are going to use it on your iPhone or other mobile phone use the ‘back to back’ version.

We would like to point out that the maps for Laneway are excellent. We’ve included them with the time tables. (Also, for me they should always be connected anyway).

We have two versions for each city. The first has the timetable and map on individual pages. This is good for double sided printing. The second has the map and timetable, smaller, but on the one page.

Please share it around. It would be really cool to turn up to the festival and see our timetable in the hands of strangers.

Here is me printing and highlighting the bands I want to see:

See you there!

I’ll be dancing to this:

- Tristan

We love the Laneway Music Festival, but their information...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:50:00 +1000

We love the Laneway Music Festival, but their information organisation sucks. We’ve made a better timetable to help festival goers in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne see the bands they want. Our improved features include:

The size of the box that the band is in accurately reflects when they are playing, and for how long.
The design allows visual scanning to see clashes.
It’s easier to highlight your favourite bands.

Here you go!

Brisbane

Sydney

Melbourne

And by popular demand, Auckland

A couple of pro-tips:

Make sure you SAVE the timetables to your computer and print them from there. Our test prints did some weird things when printing directly from browsers.
If you are going to use it on your iPhone or other mobile phone use the ‘back to back’ version.

Here’s a more in-depth analysis about what’s wrong with the official timetable and why ours is better.

If you like what we’ve done here, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Will a line around an Airport Baggage Conveyor make it easier to get to your bags? Only if we can work together.

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:30:00 +1000

I’ve written before about how I hate the design of airport baggage conveyors. At the type I wrote:

I hate is because everyone huddles around the conveyer.

It’s a catch 22 or prisoner’s dilemma. You can’t see your bag coming unless you’re close… But by everyone moving closer you clog the view.

Not only can’t you see your bag, but it’s difficult to get off.

My idea for a solution was to put line around the baggage conveyor. I even found a picture one in existence at the Tulsa International Airport:

But, I am a massive believer in the power of observation and experimentation, and did have some doubt that people would follow the rule. It looked great, and it’s easy to see that the line made the conveyor more visible to a greater number of people. Unfortunately, no one was around in Tulsa for me to watch.

But them earlier this year when I was in Helsinki — the capital of a nation known for a love of orderly queues — I found such a line:

You can imagine the service design nerd-squeal that happened inside my head. I stood back and observed.

For a while it was like the above, and it seemed to work. A couple of rule breakers near the top, but nothing major.

But then something started to change. A couple people got stated to enter the area, maybe they thought they saw their bag coming, but I can’t be sure. Either way, they entered the area and remained there.

Pretty soon the huddle started to happen:

And just like that, it was the same old story. If you stood back, you would end up 4 rows deep.

So you are either in the front row or, like the the guy in the orange bag, when your bag arrives you catch a glimpse of it just as it’s about to go past and you have to bash through a crowd of people just to get it, and then try not to bash people over or dislocate your shoulder whilst you swing it off.

It’s interesting to me how quickly the ordered system descended into a disordered one. But not surprising. It follows the experimental studies I looked at before where people copy little disorders whether that be leaving shopping cart around car parks or dirty plates in a sink.

Basically, it’s broken windows theory meets a tipping point. Perhaps the line works well most times, but this time the early few rule breakers broke the system?

If you are from Helsinki please let me know.

-Tristan

EXTRA EXTRA

We received an excellent post in the comments below from Ali Robertson which I thought was worth adding to the body:

“In Melbourne, Australia, we had something like this at train stations. The solution was to actually use rubber studs in the floor to texture the ground very differently, and provide multiple threshholds for people to ‘break through’. This was done at pretty much every station. I’ve attached a couple of images of a crowded platform 7 at Flinders street station… One from the 1920s, and one from 2007. Note the distance people now maintain from the edge - this is not due to any signs or announcements.”

1920s Melbourne Train Platform - Close to Edge.

2007s Melbourne Train Platform - Textures seem to move people away from the track.

The below is my response:

“I have actually taken photos of this in a number examples of just this point and intended to blog about it.
I believe (though I have not confirmed this) that these studs are actually for the visually impaired.

However, they definitely seem to work to provide a tactile barrier. My post was going to be if this was an unintended side-effect of a design change - I was going to try and coin this ‘unintended affordance’.

Do you know I’m incorrect that it’s unintended?

Thanks so much for the comment and pics.”

2011s London Tube Platform - Textures seem to move people away from the track.

Can anyone confirm these studs are for the visually impaired?

Do you think they move people away from the platform?

Humans in the Design of Cash: The world’s most powerful...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 04:31:05 +1000

Humans in the Design of Cash: The world’s most powerful currency doesn’t have the best design

Have you ever confused a five dollar note for $10? It’s an easy mistake to make if you live in the United States, because all American money is the same size and almost the same color. Australians don’t make this mistake, and it’s not because they are smarter.

American currency hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years. Sure, the Federal Reserve has added a lot of anti-counterfeiting features (weird gradients), and some ostensible accessibility features (giant numbers in Helvetica) but the changes have been minor increments rather than revolutionary changes. Each new little change seems to draw some criticism — mostly that the new bills look like Monopoly money — but people adapt and quickly forget the old versions.

For most of my life the look and feel of American money seemed pretty OK with me. It has a distinctive look, and even a distinctive smell. When I moved to Brisbane, I thought that the plastic Australian banknotes looked a little silly — they’re so bright and so busy, they looked even more like play money than a new American bill to me.

When I talked to Tristan about this, he answered bluntly that American money looks like play money to Australians. (Ed from Tristan: Actually I was more blunt that that…). Even more important than the aesthetics is usability to all and accessibility to citizens with disabilities. Listen to Blind Film Critic Tommy Edison explain how stupid it is for all American banknotes to feel the same:

Australia solves this problem by making banknotes’ physical size relative to their value. It’s easy to feel how much money is in your hand without having to watch the numbers. This is a great feature for people with vision problems, but it’s also better for sighted people. The notes seems to organize themselves in my wallet.

And, as you can see above, not only do Australian notes feel different they look different. The perception of Monopoly money came only from unfamiliarity — any currency would feel fake if I wasn’t used to it. The strong colors make the money easier to count — you can tell at a glance the value of a note, making every money handling event more efficient and less error prone. For example, when paying a cheque with friends at a restaurant it’s really clear how much money people are putting in, and it’s easy to sort and count. It’s hard to be a cheapskate in Australia.

Is Australian Cash better than American Cash in other ways?

The plastic feel that initially felt strange is actually a great feature because it makes the notes very durable. If, say, a $20 note falls on the floor of a mens room, it’s no problem to rinse it off in the sink because it’s made of plastic. It can go through the wash. It can be ironed. It doesn’t have that money smell, but it turns out that the smell of American money is the cumulative finger grease of everyone who has ever touched that one dollar bill.

Plastic also allows a number of anti-counterfeit measures. It’s nearly impossible to print on plastic from a home inkjet printer. Plus, it has a see-though window in the bottom corner and a shadow image that reveals itself when shown to light. These are features that can help anyone without professional equipment spot a counterfeit.

Is Australia an outlier?

Australia switched from printing pounds to dollars in 1966 and they made a big change to plastic notes with proportional sizes in 1988, but other countries have followed their lead. You can see this in the photo above I have from leftover currency from my recent trip to India where rupees aren’t just length proportional, but height, too. There’s no way you could confuse a 10 and 100 rupee note, and even illiterate users could distinguish between these notes despite the same portrait of Gandhi appearing on each denomination. Other countries even pay Australia to make their money for them — foreign currency is an export! Even the Euro followed Australia’s design lead.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

So why can’t America have nice currency?

People cite tradition and the expense of changing automatic banknote readers (see these Boing Boing comments) but I really think those arguments are unnecessarily recalcitrant. Australian vending machines and ATMs are superficially no different from their American counterparts. This is not the QWERTY keyboard.

If the Federal Reserve could redesign American banknotes from the ground up to be more accessible, they would be both better for users (blind and sighted alike) and they could include state-of-the-art anti-counterfeiting technology. And the truth is, accessibility isn’t just better for people with disabilities. It’s better for everyone.

-Tom

Learning from Destruction by Fingerprints I found this worn-out...

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 04:31:00 +1000

Learning from Destruction by Fingerprints

I found this worn-out map of the inner city loop of this Sydney rail map at the airport station. It’s the map closest to the stairs down from the terminal to the platform. There are frequently lines of people crowding around to look at it.

The type and lines are so small that you have to stand right next to it — within touching distance — to read it. You can see the way that people have put a finger on the map at the airport (green line) and traced the path to the inner city loop (on the right).

The constant wear is destroying the map, and it will have to be replaced soon. An easy solution would be a larger map focused only on the journey from the airport to the city - eliminating the touch.

But I have other ideas.

Anyone who has taken a basic Web design course will be familiar with the idea of tracking clicks. Companies like Google, eBay, and Amazon use this as a primary method to derive insights for future design.

The use of physical artefacts of behaviour can also in informing design. The most known example is desire lines - beaten paths across lawns/grass showing where people want to walk. The simple idea is to place paths in these desired locations.

The wear on this map patterns can be seen as a combination between tracking clicks and desire lines. The wear reveals that touching (click) and tracing (line) is a behavior for a lot of users, and a new map could reflect this method of use.

I can imagine a map that isn’t resistant to being touched but designed to be touched.

Each line could be raised above the surface with tick marks or indents for each stop. People could physically run the journey with their fingers and get a feel for the number of stops. With braille station names, it could even make the map more accessible to blind people.

Maybe this won’t work; it’s just an idea. But physically learning from the footprints (or fingerprints) we leave is an important place for designers to start thinking.

Great design adaptations always start with understanding what’s happening. Sometimes you can steal this from just looking.

I see these artefacts everywhere, waiting to be found and exploited.

- Tristan

PS: Desire Lines is also a great song by Deerhunter.

With an IKEA table, an old trackball, and an exercise ball we...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:30:00 +1000

With an IKEA table, an old trackball, and an exercise ball we made the word explorable with your fingertips.

(EDIT: If the video isn’t loading here, try watching it at the SAP TechEd Web site.)

Last week I (Tom) went to Bangalore, India with two other Master of Interaction Design students from the University of Queensland to present Globemaster at SAP TechEd DemoJam. Tristan blogged about the project before I joined the Humans in Design blog, and we’ve made some changes to the system since that first entry.

We adapted the system to use information from an SAP system and entered it in their contest. Specifically, we used information from an SAP sustainability report and some historical data on cricket matches against Australia. But the point of the adaptation is not necessarily that we used SAP data. Rather, it’s that you could use this system to explore any geolocated data set on a country level. There were about 8,000 people in the audience, and they voted for our team (Mike Brand, Dave Harper, Marek Kowalkiewicz and me) to win one of the most prestigious enterprise software competitions in the world.

So why is this system relevant to Humans in Design? Well, I think it’s a pretty good example of how we can use engaged, physical computing to make information more playful and accessible. We’ve taken numbers and graphs out of their standard layout and put them on a novel surface.

That seems to excite everyone from enterprise software professionals to primary school teachers. And we did it with fairly off-the-shelf parts, like an IKEA table, an old trackball, and an exercise ball.

People to just look at the data the explore the data.

At the conference, I heard about ChariTra — another SAP system that allows NGOs to post in a “have this/need that” format. It’s another dataset that could be adapted to the Globemaster system.

Tristan suggested that we could display country and company financial infomation help explore investment decisions. I’m curious to hear from Humans in Design readers: what information would you like to see around this interactive globe?

-Tom

More on the Steering Wheel

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:24:00 +1000

We recently did a 99% Invisible Podcast with Roman Mars.

Please listen to the amazing job Roman did before reading on - it won’t make sense otherwise. Let’s focus on the last part of it. In summary, when a driver’s vision is blocked:

They turn corners instead of changing lanes
They change lanes instead of avoiding obstacles

But it still begs the question: why do we make these errors?

Well Steve has an answer, and it’s hidden in the following image:

(Original image from this paper co-authored by Steve)

The rows represent the driving maneuvers in a regular car. The columns represent:

Steering Wheel Angle — what you do with the steering wheel
Vehicle Heading — the direction the car faces
Road position — where the car it is on the road

So drivers without vision make the error of moving one row up:

Notice the emphasis on regular vehicle. A regular vehicle is manipulated by turning the front two wheels whilst the rear ones remain stationary. Think of this like shopping carts with fixed rear wheels and pivoting front wheels:

This becomes important when you notice another pattern in the graph:

People naturally steer like the wheel is controlling the ‘heading’ when, four wheeled vehicle with two wheels that turn with steering, heading is not directly related to wheel position.

You can design a vehicle where heading and steering match. Think shopping carts when all four wheels can align to where you are pushing:

So, without vision or other feedback, we steer like we are using a four-wheel steering system.

Not one is sure what this actually means, but it does seem to beg the question: are we naturally better suited to four-wheel steering systems? I know that when I push carts that have only two wheel steering I find it harder than those with four.

Interestingly, there are some four wheel steering systems in on-road vehicles. In these systems the rear wheel steering is controlled by a computer.

At high speeds, such as when you’d change lanes on they highway, they turn part of they way in the same direction. This is reportedly to improve lane change maneuverability, especially when towing trailers. At low speed the wheels actually automatically turn in the opposite direction to decrease the turning radius.

However, in these systems, the rear wheels do not turn as much as the front wheels. So it changes the amplitude of change rather than what you need to do with the wheel.

There is an important reason for this. With a true four-wheel steering system where all wheels turn equally you can’t actually turn corners. You’d need another control, and that would make the system more complex. It’s not the ‘steering wheel’ that is the sole hero of this design - it’s the front turning wheels.

However, this design would fail without ability of humans to flexibly interpret the emerging environment and correct their movements accordingly (as long as we can see). Even without vision we revert to simplistic sequences but still manage to improve with time.

So, ultimately, this is a story about human skill and efficiency matching great selection of steering system design for simplicity.

- Tristan

We are extremely proud to have collaborated again with Roman at...

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:24:00 +1000

We are extremely proud to have collaborated again with Roman at 99% Invisible. Click the above, or go to soundcloud, to learn something you didn’t know about how our brains connect to steering wheels. We will have a follow up post in the coming days.

Special thanks to our friend Steve Clote who let us interview him about his awesome research. Steve has also been giving some advice to the Project Aura guys through us. He’s a humble guy doing some great work. Steve, a public thanks from HiD. Hope we are pushing you into the applied research areas!

Modern militaries use camouflage to blend-in with the...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:56:00 +1000

Modern militaries use camouflage to blend-in with the background. The patterns are intended to make even moving people or vehicles almost invisible, but it wasn’t always that way. Early naval camouflage looked much more fabulous, and they were called dazzle lines.

These patterns simply made it hard for the eye to focus on a ship, and occasionally used tromp l’oeil-like methods to give ships false dimensionality. The method was originally designed to confuse the eyes of German gunners, who had to aim optically. Commanders debated the effectiveness of dazzle lines, but it was universally accepted as a way to boost troop morale. I can’t blame them, either — ships with dazzle lines look pretty cool.

By the end of WWII, radar targeting had rendered optical aiming (and dazzle lines by exception) obsolete. Military minds changed their camouflage strategies and the psychedelic-looking patterns of WWI and WWII became a historical footnote. I had never even heard of the method until my friend Mike told me about it last week.

Militaries may have abandoned dazzle lines, but the concept lives on elsewhere. One example is the carpeting in casinos. The dizzying patterns provide no calm space for eyes to rest except for on a slot machine or poker table.

Have you noticed a dazzle effect anywhere else, even unintentionally? We’d love to hear about it in the comments.

-Tom

EXTRA EXTRA

We have recieved two great extra ideas about dazzle lines.

A project called CV Dazzle by a Brooklyn based artist. The idea was to use makeup/hair to:

“to break apart the gestalt of a face, or object, and make it undetectable to computer vision algorithms, in particular face detection”

The second appearance of dazzle lines is so obvious, and perhaps the inspiration for military dazzle lines; zebras. The second theorised reason for zebra having stripes listed on wikipedia is:

Since zebras are herd animals, the stripes may help to confuse predators—a number of zebras standing or moving close together may appear as one large animal, making it more difficult for the lion to pick out any single zebra to attack

Looking at the below picture, it sure seems likely:

Please hit us up with any more examples.

-Tristan

I was a little shocked when I read this “most...

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:31:00 +1000

I was a little shocked when I read this “most popular” listing on Brisbane’s Courier Mail last week. The paper is owed by News Corporation, but these headlines seem sensational even for Rupert Murdoch. It’s all (in two words) sex and sport. Even Australia’s first female US Open champion in 30 years was below ‘Miss Columbia forgets her undies’.

As a former newspaper worker, I know that reporters and editors love to know when one of their stories gets popular. Knowing how many people have looked at your work feels good and pageview statistics are read aloud at daily news meetings, and the newspaper’s business arm uses those numbers to sell advertising space.

But listing the most popular by stories by the number of clicks they receive only rewards headlines, not content. These headlines make readers curious — I have to admit reading items 1, 2, 4, and 9 in the Mail’s most-popular list — but the stories behind them were thin and vacuous. Many news sites frequently see their most lurid and controversial rise to the top when substantive journalism languishes without views. Others, like the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post have made a business in hyperbolic headlines.

I took a screen shot of the entire page to see how this list works in context — it gets a fairly prominent placement near the top of the page.

The Salt Lake Tribune (the paper I used to work for) does not have the pronounced editorial bias that The Courier Mail has, but it still struggles with its most controversial headlines rising to the top. This could be a result of the prominent placement of the most popular list.

In contrast, The New York Times has no most popular list. Instead, it has a “most emailed” list. This list is fundamentally different because instead of rewarding headlines, it rewards content. These are not stories that readers clicked on because of a voyeuristic tendency, but stories that they thought worthy enough after reading to be shared with a specific individual. Further, the Times places their list far downpage, emphasising that the main content on the page is curated by editors, not by numbers.

These three papers have different editorial goals the Mail and the Tribune both have a more populist tone than the Times. They may even sell ad space in different ways with. Perhaps, the Mail and Tribune are paid per click and the Times sells ad space next articles?

Whatever the cause, I think it’s important to consider how the display of these analytics can influence people’s perception of the news. Journalists chase stories that will get a lot of views; readers see journalists as rabid exploiters. It reminds me of Brook Gladstone’s great book The Influencing Machine, where Gladstone points out that the reason news is sensational is because readers like sensationalism.

News designers should be aware of this influencing machine. Gladstone makes the analogy of media as a mirror — it reflects us. I think that a popularity list can be like holding one mirror up to another. The image extends infinitely, but each reflection is more distorted than the last.

I think it’s good for journalists to know when their work is popular, but statistics of active participation and sharing are much more informative than pageviews alone.

-Tom

We’re moving towards totally original content. However,...

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:22:00 +1000

We’re moving towards totally original content. However, we just love this episode of 99% invisible too much not to share. It’s about the design of a toothbrush and best listened whilst perusing Dieter Rams ten Principles of good design.

Screencaps come from Objectified - a movie by Gary Hurswit you should buy and go see the follow up Urbanized. (Hope you don’t mind Gary).

More on the ten principles of good design here.

We’ve collaborated with 99% invisible once before and will soon again.

My Mortgage statement was rubbish. So we fixed it and...

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:00:00 +1000

My Mortgage statement was rubbish. So we fixed it and thousands watched.

So a couple of weeks ago we posted our biggest pitch yet: Mortgage Statements for the 21st Century. You can see the pitch in the above video and the statements here.

So, if you haven’t watched the video, do it now. Go on! I promise it’s cool!

Who is taking notice?

We’ve had a great response to our video with over 1000 views so far. Additionally, we’ve had personal reactions from a variety of sources including:

Freakonomics
The hidden side of everything blogged about us, saying “There is alot of worthwile stuff in it”.

John Hope Bryant
A Global leader in financial literacy advocacy who was adviser to three US Presidents

Joshua Gans
An Economist who writes for the Harvard Business Review and is featured on Freakonomics podcasts

Choice (previously Choice Magazine)
A Leading Australian consumer advocacy group

Dan Airley
Behavioral Economist and author of the best selling Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, (via a audio email)

Andrew Leigh
Australian Fedral MP for Fraser and ex excellent Australian National University Economist (via email and added us to his ‘what I am reading’ list)

Is this really a big deal?

Okay, so now you’ve all seen it, you’ll probably be thinking something like:

“Cool, that’s nicer to look at, and those guys sound really sexy. It’s nice that some fancy economics people like the idea. But is it actually a big deal?”

It is.

This graph drives home the importance of individual decision making:

(From a great piece in Crikey)

It’s Australia’s private debt (aka the people) versus Australia’s public debt (aka the government). That’s right, for all this talk of a government surplus being important, that’s not where the major risk lies.

In ratio terms Australia is very far down the list in terms of government debt. In the last 25 years, Australian private debt has gone from around 20 percent to around 100 percent GDP. About 80 percent of that is in mortgages.

It’s a the same story in the ol’ US of A:

(from a fantastic New York Times piece by Robert Reich)

Household debt is leading the way in most countries. The risk lies in our hands. It was the explosion of private (not government) debt that lay at the center of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and, ultimately, the GFC. We really need to start thinking about how to get private debt under control.

We’re thinking that proper information design will help us get out heads out of the sand. Perhaps, better understanding of the issue can cascade into other changes. So, it’s only one step, but an important one and you have to start somewhere.

Do the banks really want more informed customers?

Many readers have suggested that the banks actually want to confuse mortgage customers - essentially so they can bleed more money out of us by our sub-optimal decisions. This includes thinking about changing banks.

This might well be true. However, to sell it we see four possible positive paths:

1. Market Share
A bank recognizes that helping customers make better decisions draws more customers and they get more market share. Easy-to-read statements could be a strong marketing tool.
2. Lower Risk
A bank decides that more informed customers is an advantage through lower risk of default and go for stability as a strategy.

3. More Borrowing
The bank does not actually lose money, because once people get their loan to a certain point they engage in other activities, like more borrowing for renovations or other investments. It would be a smaller piece of a bigger pie — ultimately better for banks and their customers.

4. Data Freedom
The banks could be bypassed all together. Legislation could mandate access to our data in an easy to graph format - like a plugin by a third party or even regular easy-to-download spreadsheets. Banks would be free to display statements however they choose, but you’d find third parties quickly popping up who would graph your data.

That’s all very glass-half-full, but it’s just a video right now. We’d really like to turn it into something more. We’d love to hear your ideas about how to turn this video into a campaign and, ultimately, change.

- Tristan and Tom

We think about bicycles a lot at Humans in Design. The...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 05:01:06 +1000

We think about bicycles a lot at Humans in Design. The nice-looking bike above is Tristan’s new ride. He accidentally posted it here last week and quickly removed it, but it’s actually a good introduction to some bike related stuff. He’s currently thinking about which lights he needs for (k)night riding.

We had a post about Project Aura a few months ago. This lighting system uses wheel-mounted LEDs for improved visibility at night. The video is cool enough to watch two or three times:

The LEDs change from striped illumination to a solid circle to indicate how fast a cyclist is moving and whether they are accelerating or decelerating. But, perhaps the coolest feature is the color change from white to red to indicate acceleration or deceleration.

I really like the idea of bike lights indicating deceleration — they would serve the same purpose as brake lights in cars, but function even when a cyclist coasts to a stop. The designers plan to use kickstarter to commercialize the product.

Project Aura improves visibility from the side, but cyclists would still require frame-mounted head and tail lights for visibility from front and back.

Recently a Kickstarter page popped up for another system called Revolights, which addresses this problem. The wheel-mounted lights are directionally focused to replace headlights and tail lights.

However, Revolights do not have Project Aura’s acceleration or deceleration indicators.

As a cyclist, I don’t want these projects to compete; I want them to collaborate. Both the systems look fantastically awesome — equal parts Tron and Blade Runner. The novelty of the lights could even entice new people to take up cycling, and more cyclists on the road makes riding safer for everyone.

A project combining the features of both systems could help drivers and pedestrians see cyclists better from all directions and help riders see the road in front of them. Perhaps this is the next phase of kickstarter: not just giving good ideas a leg up but combining them for even faster innovation.

-Tom

Humans in the Design of First-World Poverty: Health and Community Effects of Project Housing Architecture.

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 19:33:00 +1000

After reading Vicky Cattell’s study on social networks in two London project housing neighborhoods I started thinking about the health impacts of design, and how the architecture of project housing affects the health and attitudes of the people who live there. Vicky looked specifically at the Keir Hardie and Cathall estates, both in East London, north of the Thames. Think Eastenders.

Though Vicky’s focus was primarily on the internal social interactions between residents each community, she also talked about the influence of the neighbourhoods on social capital; that is, the value that social relationships add to a person’s productivity in the community. Given the recent global discussion around social networking, gang violence and poverty in the UK following the August riots, it’s certainly topical.

So what’s the difference between the design of Cathall and Keir Hardie and how did this effect the humans?

Cathall, when built in 1972, was comprised of two 20-storey concrete tower blocks and a group of eight-storey concrete flats. For fans of The Wire, it’s similar to the Pit and the Tower, which was filmed at McCulloh Homes in Baltimore. This is what it looked like:

Cathall quickly became one of Britain’s poorest areas and grew a reputation as a rough place to be, due to local gangs and related violence. If you’ve heard David Cameron talk about ‘Broken Britain’, this is the sort of thing that he’s referring to.

Two of the more notorious gang-related incidents in Cathall include the murder of a 19-year-old woman who was thrown from a tower window on the 18^th floor, and the more recent murder of 14-year-old Paul Erhahon by a teen gang calling themselves the “Cathall Boys”. Not pleasant stuff.

Residents interviewed in Vicky’s paper reported little sense of pride in the area. The architecture of Cathall is described by Vicky as alienating and ugly, with elongated low rise blocks and endless concrete walkways; a design not conducive to building social networks.

Residents complained to Vicky about how the dark lifts and ‘horrible’ corridors made visiting Cathall too intimidating for their families. The impacts of these physical features resulted in distrust between residents, family dispersal, and emotional strain.

While reading about Cathall, I couldn’t help but think of the Michael Caine film, Harry Brown. You get the same sense of people living alone, not trusting their neighbours, and at the same time being surrounded by youth gangs and feeling stuck in ugly, decayed urban housing.

What did this mean for health outcomes?

Feelings of isolation, depression, stress, and poor physical health. As one resident described:

“Health on this estate is poor, because it is very stressful here. People would move in happy, and three or four months later would be chasing each other with hammers”.

Things got so grim at Cathall that in 2002, the twin concrete tower blocks were demolished.

Where else has this been a problem?

Lots of places. But after discussing the Cathall estate with Tom, the Interaction Design Guy at HiD, he pointed me in the direction of a really great example: Pruitt–Igoe, a large urban housing project built in Missouri in the 1950s.

Originally planned as an improvement on the De Soto-Carr neighbourhood, an extremely poor black ghetto previously occupying the area, Pruitt–Igoe consisted of 33 11-storey steel and concrete buildings, totalling 2,870 apartments (though they were never more than 60% occupied).

The vastness of Pruitt-Igoe is a lot like that of Aylesbury Estate, again in London, which has 2,700 apartments and is famous for being the site of Tony Blair’s symbolic first Prime Ministerial speech.

By the end of the 1960s, Pruitt–Igoe was nearly abandoned, and the neighbourhood had deteriorated into a rotting, dangerous, crime-infested place. The below photo, taken in one of the halls, gives you an idea of the state of decay it had reached.

Inside the complex, the small, cramped apartments were served by so-called “skip-stop” elevators that only stopped on the first, fourth, seventh and tenth floors. Residents living on other levels were forced to stake the stairs. The stairwells attracted muggers, and, like Cathall, Pruitt–Igoe became known as a decayed estate susceptible to gang violence.

When Pruitt-Igoe was eventually demolished in the 1970s, a lot of the blame for the project’s failure fell on its architectural problems. Although they look like little pieces of Lego when viewed from above, it’s easy enough to see the natural barriers created by the neighbourhood blocks, isolating the estate from the rest of the community.

So what are the design and human outcomes at Keir Hardie?

In contrast to Cathall and Pruitt-Igoe, the two-storey redbrick Keir Hardie estate housing, built in Canning Town after the WWII Blitz, was designed with the idea of providing pleasant living conditions for residents in mind. Rather than looming tower blocks made of concrete and steel, houses in Keir Hardie are inconspicuous and pleasant. They aren’t obviously project estates, and for this reason, I think they also lose some of the stigma associated with this type of housing. You could almost imagine Harry Potter living here.

According to Vicky’s paper, residents in this neighbourhood have a sense of pride about their working class backgrounds, and they construct their identities around the tradition and history of the area. They describe sharing rice and other foodstuff amongst each other, and relate their health in terms of the mutual aid built by their supportive community. Makes me think of the conditions of the working class in Made in Dagenham.

Despite similarities to Cathall in terms of poverty, unemployment, and deprivation, residents of the Keir Hardie estate don’t share the urban decay, isolation and depression, but rather appear to participate in a vibrant, healthier community. Further reading on the subject uncovered some interesting epidemiologic examples, such as Williamson et al.’s case study on damp housing and asthma.

What does this all mean?

It’s important to understand that low-cost housing has to be just that – low-cost, both to the inhabitants and the government organising construction. But the design of the building, both in terms of architecture and materials used, will have an impact on the health of an already at-risk group. If the impact on health and community is negative, it will impact negative economically – sick people can’t work, and poor people will use publicly funded resources if they can’t afford private health care.

More than this, badly designed public housing causes problems that can potentially extend across economic barriers. Currently in central London a lot of project housing is being emptied and sold to private buyers, who then go on to privately rent. It won’t always be the disadvantaged suffering poor health outcomes as this continues.

So we need public housing - and perhaps housing in general - to be something more like Keir Hardie; open spaces and housing designed purposely to be pleasant, and less like the depressing concrete towers of Cathall and Pruitt-Igoe.

- This post comes via our friend Charlie Ackerly (@tinyproblem) who’s doing her Masters Degree in Health Economics. She also blogs about Food, Health and Economics at Cake Factory.

Did Ballot Order Decide the 2010 Australian Federal Election?

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:01:00 +1000

Most people assume (or hope) that voters choose candidates based on informed opinions and not on factors big (like race, gender, or religion) or matters small or local (like weather or polling place). But this “rational voter theory” isn’t always true — something as simple as the order of candidates’ names on the ballot can affect the outcome of elections.

There is consistent academic evidence that being listed first on an electoral ballot is an advantage to a candidate. When candidates are listed alphabetically those with a names starting early in the alphabet see significant jumps in voting.

It is for this reason that the listing of ballot order in most democratic elections is randomized. However, this does not mean the system is unbiased. As stated by in a paper authored by Australian researchers Andrew Leigh and Amy King:

“Although the present system of random ballot ordering is fair before the ballot draw occurs (since every candidate has the same chance of heading the ballot), it is manifestly unfair once ballot order has been determined (since the candidate who draws ﬁrst position is more likely to win).”

There is still bias, but the allocation of who gets the bias is randomized. Here is the (well-designed) Australian federal electoral ballot:

Why does a candidate get a bump if picked first?

Well, technically, no one knows. In non-preferential or ‘first past the post’ systems such as they have in the UK and USA, it’s quite likely that if people have no interest and/or knowledge in a particular race they’d just check the first box as it’s the closest and therefore easiest and fastest.

Returning to with Australia it’s likely that some people simply number down the list (1, 2, 3, 4…) without thought. This form of voting in preferential systems is so common it is known has a colloquial name: the donkey vote. Below is the same ballot filled out with a donkey vote:

Another, similar explanation for the bump at number 1 in preferential voting on a two party basis is that some individuals look for the party they want to vote for, select them as ‘1’ and then return to the top and keep numbering. This seems especially likely in places like Australia where all boxes must be numbered or a vote is not counted. A semi-donkey ballot can be seen below with the voter first choice highlighted:

There may be more explanations, but a combination of the above two seems likely to account for most the bump in preferences to candidates first on the ballot in Australia. This form of fast simplified voting is humanistic and biased, therefore not fitting with the pattern of rational voting theory - it’s a pattern of humanbehavior that can be affected design.

How much does it matter?

The advantage will vary. However, that same paper by Leigh and King quoted above, called Are Ballot Order Effects Heterogeneous? investigated this issue for Australian Federal Elections. In summary (disregarding the usual scientific uncertainty) major party candidates get about a 1 percent bump in two party prefered terms if they luck out and get first on the ballot paper.

(Side note: it’s actually interesting that this number appears to be lower in Australia’s compulsory preferential voting system that America’s non-compulsory single vote system.)

Has the one percent it ever made a difference?

Leigh and Cox found in the Australian Federal Elections in 1996, 1998, 2001 and 2004 there were five occasions where the winning candidate was listed first and won by less than one percent. It is quite possible that these candidates would not have won the election without being place first. Or, as Cox and Leigh say:

“If a candidate from one of the major parties had been placed ﬁrst on the ballot in these elections, our results imply that it would have changed the outcome.”

One of those probably changed Australian Political history. Kim Beazley was selected first on the ballot in 1996 and won by a ~~margin of only 0.2 percent~~*with 50.2% of the two party preferred (TPP) vote. His party got pounded at that election and lost government. Following the election Beazley was elected opposition leader, implying that if he’d not drawn position 1 on the ballot he would not have been elected and therefore not opposition leader.

The 2010 Election was pretty close, right?

Too right!

First, a brief background on Australian politics for those that don’t know. In the lower house (where a government forms and elects the prime minister) there are 150 seats. Two sides have always dominated; the Australian Labor Party (Labor) and a coalition between the Liberal Party of Australia and the National Party of Australia (The Coalition). Each side needs votes from 76 seats to form government.

In the 2011 election both of the Major parties (Labor and Coalition) won 72 seats each leaving six others: 4 Independents, 1 Green and 1 Nationals WA - top left of below image.

Predictably, the Green split to Labor and the National to the Coaliton early. This left the score at 73 all - top right of below image. After an age of deliberation (over 2 weeks) the 4 independents split 3 to 1 to Labor giving them the win 76-74 - bottom image.

This means that if one more independent split to the Coalition there would have been a tie. If two split the Coalition would have formed government.

But more interestingly, for this post, it means that if the Coalition had taken one more seat from Labor then it would have been 73 seats to the Coalition, 71 to Labor and 6 others (left). It’s extrememly likely that the Green and WA National would still have broken to Labor and the Coalition respectively (right).

If all the preferences of the independents remained the same in this hypothetical scenario it would have been a 75 all tie. However, all the Independents noted they wanted a stable government and one of them still voted for the minority.

With a score at 72-74 in favor of the coalition it’s possible, even likely, that one of the independents that chose the Labor party would have changed their mind to the Coalition. A one seat change would probably have changed government and, given the current ideological battles, Australian history. So yes, it was close.

With such a close call did ballot order come into play?

There were 12 seats where a winning candidate got 51.5 percent of the two party preferred vote or less and 6 at or below 51 percent. I went to the AEC website and looked at the ballot order in these races and plugged this into a spreadsheet. In two of these races the winning candidate was placed first on the ballot.

In the electorate of Greenway the Labor candidate, Michelle Rowland, won with only 50.88 percent of TPP vote and was first on the ballot. Her major party rival was placed directly behind her at second.

In the electorate of Lindsay the Labor Candidate, David Bradbury, had 51.12 percent and was also first on the ballot. His major party rival was seventh (actually the last position).

One seat’s margin was under boost predicted by Leigh and King. A second was just slightly over. This means Labor probably gained one more seat and possibly two on ballot luck alone.In other words, without this luck, it’s likely that the Coalition would have formed government.

Did ballot order decide the election?

Well, yes and no. One percent is so low, as seen in the image below. It could only decide the election because it was so close.

But given that it was so close it allowed small factors to come into play. Therefore, ballot order probably was a deciding factor. If you made me choose between yes and no, I’d go with yes.

So, in my opinion, we ended up with this prime minister:

rather than this:

because of this:

There is more to say on this issue, including possible fixes. But that’s enough of a prompt for now. Please let us know what you think - especially if your name is Andrew Leigh

- Tristan

*Edited it a little throughout based on a reader comment that I mixed up my margins. I did, but not the results. If a candidate get’s 51% of the TPP vote then they win by a margin of 2%. However, if you get a 1% bump from being first on the ballot then, you have to take that 1% off the other side. So when I said “margin” it was incorrect. But being under 51% of the TPP vote does, I believe, correctly interpret Leigh and King. Also edited ‘Labour’ to ‘Labor’.