Clear issue is that why are these not separate systems or pages entirely. Registering for this process should be entirely separate from using it. And if also paper forms are accepted, whole process should need more tracking from canditate.
I remember watching a bit on TV years ago about the president of Iceland flying commercially just like any other passenger. I thought at the time there was no way the president of a country really flew around like that. Years later I found myself sitting behind the president of the Turks and Caicos islands on a commercial flight and thought, "huh, I guess I was wrong."
The Prime Minister of Singapore, a country that could very easily afford a fleet of private jets if they wanted to, travels on Singapore Airlines. If you're a frequent flyer based on Singapore, running into extra security because he's on board is a not-uncommon occurrence.
Singapore also specifically prides itself on its airline being rated one of the best in the world. Though I don't think the Emir of Dubai flies Emirates.
Emirates should be in Abu Dhabi
No, Emirates is Dubai and Etihad is Abu Dhabi.
Oh thank you
There's a whole wiki page for this! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_transports_of_heads_of_sta...
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.
I don't get why they don't just fly Air New Zealand anyway given that the govt owns 52% of it...
Because commercial events will lead Australians to hold the NZ Prime Minister as a hostage.
Again.
My question is how you recognised the president of the Turks and Caicos islands - I'm certainly not qualified to pick him out in a crowd! Perhaps you live on said islands?
I was flying once with the president of the EU commission that time, a socialist Portuguese. The highest ranking European. I loved Barroso. Two rows ahead of me, and a lot of people started talking to him.
Think about von der Leyen flying commercial :)
A little related: during the 2008 economic meltdown, the finance minister of Iceland was about to fly out of the country to meet other FM's and talk about the crisis. He was wondering if he should take cash with him, so worried he was that credit cards would stop working...
The current president of Mexico, at the beginning flew commercial flights but after a year or two he got tired of the sneering and insults (well deserved).
A lot of leaders of smaller countries don't bother with most of the VIP treatment we see from the big ones. If the country is relatively at internal and external peace there isn't all that much danger to their safety.
The president of Argentina intended to fly commercial but security told him to stop that.
Iceland's population is less than that of Wyoming, and I wouldn't be surprised if the governor of Wyoming was on a normal flight.
I don't think people realize how tiny the population of Iceland is. For some perspective, Detroit's population is 60% higher. The mayor of Austin TX governs over double the citizens as Iceland's president.
I never understand why people think the following "fire extinguisher inside" sticker is a good idea:
https://www.firesupplydepot.com/fire-extinguisher-inside-lab...
To me it is the same thing as the La La Land fiasco.
When a fire breaks out and you begin to panic the stickers help reduce cognitive load by instinctually guiding people to cabinets containing fire fighting equipment. What is the problem?
Perhaps the point is the text? The European version of that sticker has a picture of an extinguisher, sometimes with text in the local language underneath.
Is picture better though? This actually looks like a bottle of soda next to a Christmas tree: https://www.brady.eu/signs/iso-7010-sign-fire-extinguisher-c...
Even panicked people can still read and a big "FIRE" word is actually quite easy to recognize, unlike the picture above.
We learn that symbol and others before we learn to read.
You get exposed to the symbol for a fire extinguisher that much as a child? I would expect encountering it at some point not before reading.
I took it to be a joke, but the symbol will be shown in several places around a nursery/kindergarten. It's also designed to be noticed, and printed on a reflective (often glow-in-the-dark) material.
https://www.holytrinity.herts.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020... (primary school corridor).
https://www.building-blocks-nurseries.co.uk/uploads/rucV7eaP... (nursery corridor).
There is some truth to this. I can distinctly remember attempting to memorise the classes of fire extinguisher listed next to this symbol (some types are suitable for electrical fires, others are not etc.) not long after learning to read.
Yes. It's in grocery stores, on buses, in kindergarten, in hospitals and health centres, pretty much everywhere. There's roughly two years of chatting between 2 and 4 years old, and it would be kind of weird to not talk about fire, fire fighters, extinguishers, during those years.
Even if you can't read, the meaning of the symbol is clear as it's always seen next to a fire extinguisher.
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.
To me it is the same thing as the La La Land fiasco.
You mean the movie? What was the fiasco? I haven’t seen the movie but hear good things.
A reference to the mishap at the Oscars I assume.
I guess I still don’t understand OP then, as the presumptive cause of that mishap was the design of the envelopes text being hard to read; if anything, having a sign that clearly says “fire extinguisher inside” alongside iconography is better than simply having vague icons.
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...
What could make them a bad idea? Seems like a piece of information people only need very rarely but when they DO need it they need it to be as instantly obvious as possible.
What could make them a bad idea?
An arsonist can get rid of all the fire extinguishers before setting their fire!
How on earth is this related to the article?
Those stickers seem like an example of good and obvious design.
Am I missing something?
The thing that surprises me the most is the page is in English. I know nearly everyone in Iceland is very fluent in English, but they all speak and read Icelandic too.
English has become entrenched as the de facto second official language of Iceland. It's a very depressing trend for the conservation of Icelandic, and the ongoing promotion of English will only continue to exacerbate its decline.
Would you prefer another second language, or that people refuse fo speak anything but Icelandic?
Jeg snakker norsk, men det er alikevel vanskelig å forstå islandsk!
If it were a matter of choosing another language, Polish might be a more natural choice, as Poles form the largest minority in the country.
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!
I remember in the 80s when the Nordic TeX Users Group was formed, they did all of their official communications in English so as not to privilege any of the national languages of their membership.
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.
⸻
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.
Just to be clear, I do see the value in a group like the Nordic TeX Users Group choosing a neutral language for simplicity and fairness. However, it's quite different when a whole nation adopts a new language just because it's the easy option, without considering the repercussions.
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.
That's very common in smaller countries. The government exists to serve its citizens, not the other way around. When you know a significant minority is less than fluent in your somewhat-obscure local language, providing a translation for that minority is almost a no-brainer.
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.
Also because Europe, thanks to the frequency of jus sanguine, people like me can be born and raised in Canada but be a citizen of some European country because my parents were born in its predecessor country many decades ago. So I’m eligible to vote (tho I don’t), but minimally speak that language and have spent minimal time there.
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.
I would tend to guess that the reverse of your assumption about Google Translate is true. The translations from an uncommon language available for training will, by far, outnumber the translations to that language.
But the translations from an uncommon language to a different uncommon language will still be far more rare.
Just guessing, but I imagine that Google Translate probably will, assuming, say, we represent Zapotec to English as f and English to Kannada as g use f ∘ g to infer the translation of Zapotec to Kannada. And saying that, I’m guessing that if the corpus of f⁻¹ is too small, it can probably attempt to infer the gaps from f. But these inferred mappings are probably of lower quality than explicit ones returning us to the original issue.
And man, I really wish someone who actually knew would weigh in on this.
Somewhere around 7% of people in Iceland don't speak Icelandic[1][2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Iceland [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language
Both English and Icelandic versions are available (potentially hidden in the burger menu on mobile): https://island.is/forsetaframbod
When you land on the page, it defaults to Icelandic (it did from me and I'm from Canada): https://island.is/forsetaframbod
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.)
Don’t make people think or read too much — they’ve got things to do
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?
it's not a vote, it's the possibility for a candidate to participate in the election. imo we have the same process in france (slightly more complexe) this is just a process to pre-eliminate jokes and unserious people then you still need a regular campaign
I understand that it is not a vote but it is basically signing an online petition.
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.
To me, endorsing someone to run is a much much lower threshold than actually voting for them. Anyone should have the ability to run for office in a democracy, doesn’t mean I want them to win.
In France at least, there is a really high pressure on all people in power to not endorse candidates of opposing parties.
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).
You shouldn't take it lightly, but you may already have decided you want to when you arrive at the page, and then a bunch of text will at least for some seem like it is an annoying obstacle to doing what you've already thought through.
That's fair, but why would they see (what they think is) "log in to endorse someone" as the part of the process which requires deliberative thought?
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.
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?
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".
in the United States we proved that is not necessary traits for leader yet functional infrastructure, intelligence, and military
Yes, but presumably those people read it and registered knowingly. It's the people who did not want to run for presidency that did not read.
"People don't read" should be tattooed on the back of every designer's hand.
Of course, they won't read it before they design something that requires deep engagement through reading.
“1. Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it.
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...>
3. And if they do read something, they don't understand what they read, either because it's poorly written or because they start from different assumptions than the ones the writer had in mind.
I like to think about design as a communication medium.
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.
Just the designers? Tattoo it on the back of everyone's please
Is there any point in tattooing it on the back of the hands of people who don't read?
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.
Also, a good warning sticker to put on books
But who would read the tattoo?
Can we focus on the fact that anyone in this country can register to run for a president?
When do we fight for such right to freely nominate and endorse each other for leadership positions in our countries, too?
The US is about the same, isn't it?
https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_presidential_candi...
In one country it’s so easy, you can do it by accident (11 people this last weekend).
In US it’s possible… with hundreds of thousands signatures, thousands of $ and going through 50 bureaucratic procedures.
About the same, huh?
You need to read the article more carefully.
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 think I understood the article well.
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.
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".
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.
What's kind of a problem for me is that, in my country, namely the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, doing such a thing would amount to high treason. Lowering my sights from 'King' to 'Prime Minster' is more doable, but technically that is not a democratically elected position anyway; it's an appointment by the favour of the reigning monarch. That is, you can freely endorse someone, but the King isn't obliged to take any notice.
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.
Honestly this is worse than a "design issue" of the button styles or "people not reading" here.
"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.
Or simply: "become a president"
I think Amazon has a patent on "becoming a president in one click", you might have to pay them some royalties.
I was going to point out that Amazon is American, and thus would have been unlikely to file in Iceland. Unfortunately, however, Iceland is a party to the Patent Cooperation Treaty, so it is probable that an patent that Amazon holds in the USA would have also been granted in Iceland.
P.S. Iceland the country, not the retailer, in case that's not clear in this context ;)
I assumed the page was in Icelandic and the author translated the UI for his english-speaking audience?...
Nope, there definitely is an english-language version, at least of the site that's live now.
Many of these people are seriously vying for president (yep, my aunt Helga), some of them have undoubtedly signed up as a joke (nope, not the comedian)
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.
Comedians would actually make great politicians because the overlapping skillset is quite similar.
Zelenskyy seems to have risen to the occasion.
Also Al Franken was a US Senator.
Pretty sure he's the same one mentioned vying for president. His name showed up in the list when I visited the page.
(I will always love the fact that a prominent politician in Iceland used to be in the Sugarcubes with Bjork.)
He's also the one running for president.
https://grapevine.is/news/2024/04/03/comedian-and-former-rey...
This is bad/confusing design for sure. Add this to the (probably) huge list of examples.
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.
And link to the butterfly ballot https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/19/bad-ballot-d...
For a clear illustration of how much that ballot screwed Al Gore, look at Pat Buchanan's vote in Palm Beach county, compared to every other county. He clearly got 2000+ votes that were meant for Al Gore. Gore lost by less that 550 votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
Yes. Crazy. False positive missile alerts are kind of upsetting to people
Be wary of generic buttons. lol
Perhaps this button shuld have said "Run for president!"
Exclamation mark in this case is justified IMHO.
My college's login form has "don't remember me" checkmark :).
that's clever!
In the redesigned version, the “Log in” button has been replaced by a link that reads, “establish a collection of endorsements,” which is much, much clearer.
That seems unnecessarily verbose, and still slightly ambiguous. How about "Endorse a Candidate" and "Become a Candidate"?
This would help a bit, but loads of people still see a button and click the button without realizing what they click on. It's best to keep stuff as far away as possible, especially when one of the actions is to become the potential president of Iceland
I love how the website on UX design actively locks your possibility to zoom in on mobile.
It sends me a clear message that I should search for UX knowledge elsewhere.
I never noticed that Medium blocks pinch-to-zoom on mobile! (At least, in Firefox for Android.) That's a really obnoxious design choice in itself, and it's particularly bad when there are desktop screenshots in an article like the one here.
I keep on noticing moments bad UX creeping into apps, more and more, for little possible benefit. Do frontend people simply not think about 2nd and 3rd order consequences anymore?
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.
Economic factors really play a significant role though. Languages spoken by smaller populations or in remote areas may face challenges in economic development.
Good luck to aunt Helga!
If that happened to me I'd take it as a sign from the heavens and I'd keep pushing forwards.
It seems there is a correlation between appearing at the beginning of the list of candidates to endorse and having a last name that starts with "A".
Imagine living in a world so wonderful that you actually had to look on relatively obscure web pages to find such UI screw-ups...
That site clearly had UX issues and I'm glad it was redesigned, but I disagree with your statement in principle. I think it would actually be great for democracy if every time you were asked to support some official, you had a call-to-action for taking their role.
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.
Nit: Approval voting (yes/no for each candidate) is easier to implement and also understand. I couldn't rank 82 people, but could yes/no them...
As long as you can answer a (long) series of "do you prefer A or B" questions, you can totally rank 82 people.
If I was voting in this election, I'm nearly certain I would not be able to answer that for most of the 82.
Well, if there's an A/B pair you can't separate, just pick either at random.
If my bottom 60 are all randomly shuffled then I haven't really ranked 82 people.
Approval voting is just a different flavor of the same popular candidate tyranny. We need to be able to express support for non-duopoly candidates over the duopoly ones, and not continue to be held hostage fully supporting mainstream party #1 by the threat of mainstream party #2.
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?)
Hardly a nit when approval voting, unlike _any_ ranked-choice system, isn't mathematically shown to be inherently unsatisfactory.
Just pick your top 5 and it'll work out fine.
In Iceland, the president is chosen by simple majority of votes. The sitting president got about 39% of the vote. There were 9 candidates. Of course, this problem is usually brushed off saying that this is a largely powerless office, the prime minister and his cabinet hold the executive power.
A majority of votes would be 50.1%. More votes than any other candidate is called a plurality.
Ranked choice voting? The one with a litany of famous theorems about how no ranked-choice voting system is satisfactory? (Arrow, Gibbard-Satterthwaite, &c.)
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.
Does it not being satisfactory mean it's worse than FPTP voting in the case where you're electing a single person?
People end up taking some many unplanned and unwanted responsibilitiesz why isn't governing one of those? Why isn't any fellow citizen a good leader than any other?
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.
For a country whose population is just 399,189 (according to 2024 census), I don't think what you propose is necessary.
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.
Yeah, it was actually neatly resolved here by applying separation of concerns and just doing the totally different things on different pages. People wanting to endorse a candidate are not the same as people wanting to be a candidate.
They are now - the site was redesigned once this problem became clear!