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Convened by the American Association for the
Advancement of Science
Main | Participants
Usability is critical to all electronic systems that involve interactions
with people. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the science of understanding
how people are going to use a system and the practice of designing in
correspondence with that understanding, is especially critical to voting
technologies. If voters cannot comprehend what is on a ballot, if they
cannot easily remember or recognize their choices, if they have difficulty
carrying out the actions required to cast a vote, if they make mistakes,
and if they lack trust and confidence in the voting apparatus, then there
is little point in insuring the security, privacy, and accountability
of their likely erroneous choices. These human issues vary considerably
across different voter groups, and so it is critical to conduct usability
studies across broad samples to inform the ballot design process.
Usability standards for many issues such as legibility and comprehensibility
currently exist to help in the design of ballots. Unfortunately, it is
often difficult to achieve good usability even with standards. Electronic
voting systems introduce a host of new issues for voters, such as navigability,
error checking, and trust in vote recording. Electronic voting systems
have also introduced significant usability problems involving other stakeholders
such as election officials making technology choices and poll workers
who aid voters at election time. It is critical that guidelines for usability
and usability testing be developed for electronic systems for all stakeholders
at every point in the process including designing the interface, deploying
machines, aiding voters, collecting votes, and evaluating performance
after elections.
User-centered design is the practice of involving users and users' perspectives
in an iterative development process. Guidelines for electronic ballots
should include the collection of behavioral data from multiple user and
stakeholder groups, and standards should include specific behavioral targets.
A system which fails to meet behavioral standards, or which has not been
user tested, should be treated the same way as a system that fails to
meet security standards or has not undergone security testing, i.e. it
should not be fielded. This requirement would have to be met anew for
each ballot with significant differences. To facilitate this process,
ballot construction and evaluation tool kits should be developed that
can be used by local election officials to produce and test various electronic
ballot designs.
Electronic voting machines are entering the domain of other electronic
consumer products and this introduces at least three important and novel
issues:
1) Electronic ballots will exist within a broad context of other electronic
information sources and this context should not be ignored during the
design process.
2) Electronic ballot design will have to become an iterative process
that involves rapid prototyping and that is informed by ongoing user evaluation.
3) An electronic ballot has the potential to introduce new features that
are not traditionally part of the ballot. Examples include online help,
the possibility of offering different "views" of ballot information (e.g.
toggling between a summary and the complete text of a proposition), interaction
with completed sample ballots on other devices (e.g. downloading preselected
votes from a PDA or cell phone), or dynamic changes in fonts, languages,
or other display features. While the initial reaction to such issues is
often that they do not belong as part of voting, election designers and
planners should recognize that electronic systems will become quickly
antiquated and obsolete (both technically and in terms of interaction
features) and that redesign cycles could become as frequent as election
cycles.
My research involves the first issue in the list above, specifically
the context of voting. Research questions include detailed observation
of how people gather information from electronic sources, how they share
that information, and how to design a political portal that informs, encourages
participation and deliberation, is trusted, and integrates well with voting
technologies.
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