CDF for Voting Systems: Human Factors Issues

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CDF for Voting SystemsHuman Factors Issues

• Sharon Laskowski, PhD
• National Institute of Standards and Technology
• sharon.laskowski_at_nist.gov

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Human Readable?

• What human (user)? What task?
• Usability is achieved by accessing and
  manipulating data through an application with a
  well-designed user interface
• Usability of XML documents
• A common data format is intended to be
  machine-readable much like a programming language
• Data are typically instances of XML schemas
• Data is handled by applications

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Achieving Usability

• A CDF allows applications to be designed which
  share XML documents, provide user interfaces
  (UIs), and translate data into artifacts to
  support those UIs
• The UIs are designed for specific users and
  tasks, e.g.,
• Security people examine the instances directly
• Election officials need applications to support
  many of their tasks such as voter registration,
  check in at the polls, counting, audits, etc.
• Election officials dont want to re-enter data,
  they want to automatically populate a database
  and an application

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Data Presentation in a CDF

• The specification of the presentation of data
  must be separate from the data
• E.g, style sheets
• Not embedded in other schemas
• This flexibility is critical to UI design (to
  support the user and the task)

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Include the Human in the System When Building
Presentation Schemas

• Presentation needs to be addressed where the
  human interacts with the voting system, e.g.,
• Ballot design
• Audio ballot/audio recording and other media
• Translation into other languages and character
  sets
• Session logs
• Privacy fields cannot be mandatory if they could
  violate privacy
• Testing/debugging the CDF create typical use
  cases and scenarios