CDF for Voting Systems: Human Factors Issues

1. CDF for Voting Systems:Human Factors Issues Sharon Laskowski, PhD National Institute of Standards and Technology sharon.laskowski@nist.gov

2. 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

3. 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 don’t want to re-enter data, they want to automatically populate a database and an application

4. 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)

5. 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