How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland?
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uxdesign.cc
Edit to add: I'm not sure if you added the "or pages" later or if I just missed it when replying, but my response was specifically about the suggestion that they should be separate systems. Separate pages totally makes sense, and I do think that's a good solution.
On that note, I don't see any issue whatsoever with 82 people running for presidency - why not more? "Politics are too serious a matter to be left to politicians" -Charles de Gaulle
I wouldn't have an issue if the election used ranked choice voting.
Otherwise, however, it could be a disaster, with the winning candidate only having a tiny percentage of the vote.
Unfortunately this devolves into geeking out over voting systems. Despite having the most popular support, Instant Runoff Voting is also a hot mess with its surprising nonintuitive outcomes. The way I see it, RCV/Condorcet is the way to go, regardless of the criticism that it allows for ties - it's criteria is straightforward and what most people would consider fair. Solve the ties with a tiebreaker IRV round (same input data type) or just a second election since they're going to be really rare with any significant population (how many times do we have ties with plurality?)
Because even you would agree that some people are better leaders than others.
People aren’t good at something (e.g. leading a country in the modern and complex time) juts because you wish it so.
Why would one ever want ranked-choice voting? It isn't even deranged in a way that advantages some type of candidate, it's just mathematically deranged.
Here in New Zealand there is a military transport option but it's always breaking down and, by all accounts, nowhere near as comfortable as a commercial carrier.
Again.
Think about von der Leyen flying commercial :)
Of course, they won't read it before they design something that requires deep engagement through reading.
That said, https://readabilityformulas.com/readability-scoring-system.p... is a good sanity check. Over half of people can't read text above a grade 8 readability. Worse yet, we aren't conscious of the effort that reading takes. Not until we are struggling. So competent people have little sense of the barriers they create.
2. In fact, users can’t read anything, and if they could, they wouldn’t want to.”
— <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...>
So for most stuff the manual goes straight to the shelf. Unless it is something particularly powerful or complex, I see having to refer to the manual as a failure in UX design.
So yeah, I don't want to refer to the manual.
I remember there was a terrible UX error a while back in Hawaii wasn't there?
And the "butterfly ballot" issue in the 2000 election is another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
Here's an example: Disappearing affordances. For some reason, the button to remove the background from Google Meet went from being its own "Remove Background" button, to all background thumbnails becoming a toggle button.
This is fine, so long as the selected background is visible. But if it's not, perhaps because the selected background is outside the viewport of the scrollable selector, then what's happened, is that the affordance of the "Remove Background" button simply disappeared.
For example: I am a Dutch citizen. Due to the European Union I have the right to live and work in Iceland. If I were to move there, I'd gain the right to vote in local elections (not national ones, gotta be a citizen for that) - without speaking a word of Icelandic. I'd also have to do taxes, renew my driver's license, and all the other government stuff.
Either I and the thousands like me are going to use Google Translate and screw it up, or they'll just have one of the many bilingual workers provide an official translation. It makes a lot of sense to just translate all official government pages, making an exception for this specific page is probably more work than just translating it too.
I’d also assume Google Translate will do better translating from English to $OtherLanguage than Icelandic to $OtherLanguage. So makes sense to put up a translation into English (or other common language) and make sure it’s correct.
And man, I really wish someone who actually knew would weigh in on this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Iceland [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language
Similarly, English is a standard language in India in part because of the linguistic diversity of the country¹ and being an outsider language means that communications in English don’t privilege any of the indigenous ethnic groups, although it seems that English usage has been dropping in favor of English.
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1. English usage was supposed to have been phased out fifteen years after independence, but the mandated sunset was changed by constitutional amendment in 1963 (apparently a year after the sunset date(!)). India has 22 scheduled languages—i.e., languages receiving constitutional recognition and encouragement—but there are 122 major languages with more than 10,000 speakers. I think India wins the prize for the greatest linguistic diversity among the nations of the world.
This crutch of using English in Iceland not only discourages (and actively prevents) newcomers from learning Icelandic, but it also creates a paradoxical reliance on a language that most immigrants do not speak prior to their arrival. This creates challenges, particularly hindering integration, as Icelandic is (for the time being) still required in most aspects of society. It also threatens the preservation of our language, which is only spoken by around three hundred thousand people.
Jeg snakker norsk, men det er alikevel vanskelig å forstå islandsk!
But to answer the question, I personally lean towards discouraging English as the default second language and instead focus on strengthening Icelandic. Encouraging everyone to communicate in the native tongue, regardless of proficiency level, can be very effective. That was certainly my experience when my family and I moved to Catalonia.
Norskan er auðlesin, en ég á erfiðara með að skilja talmál!
However, it does have an "EN" button near the top right. Personally, I think this is as close to a perfect solution as you can get. (Geolocating an IP or something has a whole bunch of problems than just going with your country's official language as a default.)
That seems unnecessarily verbose, and still slightly ambiguous. How about "Endorse a Candidate" and "Become a Candidate"?
"Register to collect endorsements" does not explicitly say whose endorsements. It is possible to read this sentence as a (slightly odd) way to say "Register to have your endorsements collected".
"Collect" is a rather ambiguous verb, if I saw a button on a different website saying "register to collect favorites", I would understand that the website is building the collection, from my clicking on items... not that others will fav my profile.
"Register as a candidate to collect endorsements" would have been much clearer, whether the visitor read the preceding block of text or not.
P.S. Iceland the country, not the retailer, in case that's not clear in this context ;)
When do we fight for such right to freely nominate and endorse each other for leadership positions in our countries, too?
The truly direct and democratic path to leadership is that of running for membership of the House of Commons, which is not something I haven't considered with some seriousness on occasions. However, independent candidates rarely get as far as their party-affiliated counterparts.
https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_presidential_candi...
In US it’s possible… with hundreds of thousands signatures, thousands of $ and going through 50 bureaucratic procedures.
About the same, huh?
A bunch of people accidentally signed up to the process that lets people collect endorsements.
They still need 1500 endorsements to actually get on the ballot. Much like you need 800 signatures to get on the ballot in New Jersey.
Making it digital instead of paper is more convenient but doesn't change things all that much.
And while some states have pretty big numbers for signature count, at most they seem to be a pretty similar percentage of the population to Iceland's 1500. Most states are far less.
Edit: I forgot to address needing 50 filings, but that's easy compared to the signatures. The population-adjusted equivalent of a candidate with 3 hardcore supporters in Iceland is a candidate with 2500 hardcore supporters in the US.
I'm trying to compare the barriers to entry—very easy in Iceland, very difficult in US.
There are 11 confirmed candidates in Iceland's 2024 election.
Following your suggestion with population-adjusted equivalents, USA should have 9946 candidates in this year elections, if you believe that "convenience doesn't change things all that much".
With such difficult barriers of entry, we effectively bar majority of the population from running for office. I don't think it's either fair or truly democratic.
That's not how the population adjustment works. If the threshold is that 0.4% of the population has to endorse a candidate, then 1000x population does not mean 1000x candidates.
Maybe you could find 9900 people that have 1500 supporters. But those people aren't trying to get on the ballot because that's a tiny amount of support in the US.
> With such difficult barriers of entry, we effectively bar majority of the population from running for office. I don't think it's either fair or truly democratic.
Not any office, specifically a country-wide office has these thresholds. And I think they're just fine.
I think a bare minimum threshold should be 0.1% of the population. Why would you want anyone below that level to be on the ballot? People that are going to get 0% of the vote are just wasting space. It's not undemocratic to tell them to get more endorsements.
That's not to say there couldn't be improvements, but it's hard to imagine more than 10-20 viable candidates.
Reykjavik had a comedian as mayor: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/15/jon-gnarr-come...
His memoir was a good light read. Poignant and hilarious.
(I will always love the fact that a prominent politician in Iceland used to be in the Sugarcubes with Bjork.)
https://grapevine.is/news/2024/04/03/comedian-and-former-rey...
It sends me a clear message that I should search for UX knowledge elsewhere.
That is great an all but when you are endorsing someone for a serious position of power, shouldn't we want them to be engaged and thinking?
Here is the expected behavior: The prospective candidate asks someone to support them and sends them the link. The supporter is supposed to scroll the list, find the candidate and click to support them.
This is failing because the first element that the supporter sees is the register link.
I do think that the redesigned page looks better but in my view endorsing someone or signing a petition is not a task that someone should take lightly.
Yes they should consider who and whether to endorse, they should probably check to make sure they're doing the endorsement correctly, but if you're looking for the Log In button to do the endorsement and you see what looks like a normal EULA above a prominent Log In button of course some percentage of people are going to skim over that.
The excuse is always “But he poses a threat to democracy”, but that is the very proof that the person is not a comedian, and thus, by your standards, should be allowed to run. And heck, be elected, because nothing is a threat to democracy more than preventing people from voting the option they want (ask UK who ran 4 votes before admitting that the citizen wanted to leave; heck, ask France, who kept voting for their king, so the democratic forces killed hundreds of thousands of citizen (Lyon’s population was slashed by 2), until the parliament has had enough that the French kept voting for the king instead of voting for the guardians of the revolution and finally guillotined the king - yes, most democracies were born by killing the characters that the people wanted to elect).
If you want to endorse someone and get a political SMS to endorse them you've probably already done the thinking of "whom do I want to vote for". What they're trying to do is just support someone. I suspect many people did not even realize there was an option there to "run for prez".
Exclamation mark in this case is justified IMHO.
https://www.firesupplydepot.com/fire-extinguisher-inside-lab...
To me it is the same thing as the La La Land fiasco.
Even panicked people can still read and a big "FIRE" word is actually quite easy to recognize, unlike the picture above.
https://www.holytrinity.herts.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020... (primary school corridor).
https://www.building-blocks-nurseries.co.uk/uploads/rucV7eaP... (nursery corridor).
The fire part is also on the emergency exit sign.
I don't know the word for fire in Hungarian, but I will recognise these symbols next time I'm in Budapest.
Those stickers seem like an example of good and obvious design.
Am I missing something?
An arsonist can get rid of all the fire extinguishers before setting their fire!
You mean the movie? What was the fiasco? I haven’t seen the movie but hear good things.
In fact, I’m further confused by the La La Land reference, as the Academy redesigned the envelopes specifically to avoid this issue arising again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/89th_Academy_Awards#Best_Pictu...
> The design of the envelopes could have been a factor. The envelopes were redesigned this year to feature red paper with gold lettering that specified the award enclosed, rather than gold paper with dark lettering. That could have made the lettering harder to read. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, not PwC, is responsible for the design and procurement of the envelopes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/business/media/pwc-oscars...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170228032107/https://www.nytim...