Voting

Lynea and I went and did our civic duty earlier today, and voted.

The last time I voted, the polling station was at Duncan's school, which made it very easy. This time it was at a local Baptist church, just a little further away (but with excellent parking). Lynea was the smart one. She'd applied for absentee voting forms. She was able to fill them out beforehand, take them along with her and just hand them in, saving herself the thirty minute wait to use one of the five touch screen voting machines. Of course, she then had to wait for me (and forgot to bring her knitting or a book to read), but at least it was beautiful weather for this time of year.

Unlike the sample ballot (which I don't think they could make any harder to read or understand), I found the voting machines to be almost fully understandable. There were a few minor HCI improvements that could have been made. For example, it wasn't totally obvious that you needed to press the Continue button three times to complete your review of the votes you had cast. But overall (and compared with some software applications I've had to use recently -- like our CAMS equipment ordering process), it was fairly easy to use and I was impressed.

There were a couple of old folks further ahead in line from me. I heard the husband say something like "my wife considers me almost brain dead, so I'm going to get her to help me". We all had a chuckle, but he almost had the right idea. Nobody was going to think any the less of him if he got stuck. But the technology shouldn't be impossible to use. You shouldn't have to struggle to understand how to use it, no matter what age you are.

When I was doing a lot of customer demonstrations about 25 years ago, I got handed a little card. It had a few blank areas that you could fill in. It went something like this:

Hi, my name is ________,

I've been listening to you now for ___ minutes, 
and I don't understand a single thing you've said. 
If your company has somebody who is capable of
speaking English, please get them to contact me 
at ___________

It has a big effect on me. After that, I tried to find out the technical skill level of the people I was demonstrating to before hand, and adjusted the presentation accordingly.

In the case of a voting machine, maybe it just needs a good HCI person to fixup the final small nits. Oh, and someone who speaks English, to write the sample ballot form.

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( Nov 07 2006, 04:00:23 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink