Designing voting with Smartmatic
After contributing to the design of electronic voting systems, our Lead Designer Chiara Lino spoke with us about why the most cutting edge part of voting is user experience.
Matters: So, how do you design voting?
Chiara: We’ve been working on products and UX with Smartmatic for years. When it comes to elections, we learned that the best solutions can involve a mix of physical and digital touch points; pulling from the best of both. Electronic and paper tallies work together to ensure a balance between transparency, speed, anonymity, and traceability. We always keep in mind the nerve-racking fact that we are working towards ensuring fair and democratic elections around the world! So we think about every step in the design process from the perspective of an ordinary citizen using an unfamiliar machine to cast an important — and possibly life-changing — vote on a single day. It’s really about how you design a voting machine that will fulfill different scenarios, and about figuring out how to design the most intuitive and trustworthy journey for voters and pollsters alike.
Matters: Tell us about the work you and the team at Designit Oslo did…
Chiara: Smartmatic’s touchscreen A4–500 voting machine has a lot of next-generation features to make it more secure and auditable. It’s also customizable, which is important because all elections are unique. We’re really proud of the fact that it has more accessibility features than previous versions, including an extra-large touchscreen and an audio interface — this is critical because according to the World Bank, 15 percent of the world’s population experiences some form of disability. And one thing we must ensure is that everyone has the chance and ability to exercise their right to vote, safely and anonymously.
Matters: How does electronic voting help increase trust in the election process?
Chiara: It improves transparency, which is critical when it comes to election results. We can now count and communicate results faster. Western democracies tested the voting process over time, but in developing countries, where democracy is more recently established and still in earlier stages, it’s not as well ingrained. With manual voting, it can take days or weeks to reach rural areas and count results, which leaves more time for corruption to take place. When you put an electronic voting grid in place, results get communicated almost immediately, so it’s harder to tamper with them.
Matters: What are the most important issues when designing a competent voting system?
Chiara: Many people forget how complex an election system is: It goes beyond the machine, which of course has to handle far more than casting votes. There’s also the administration process for opening, activating, and closing the polls, and finally for counting votes. All of this has to be seamless, failsafe, and tested for every possible glitch or misunderstanding. Voting machines need to be reliable and intuitive not only for voters, but even more so for poll workers and polling officials who ensure that votes get cast properly on election day. It all boils down to one day, so you have to get it right.
Matters: How easy is it for poll workers to figure out these systems?
Chiara: Not as easy as one would think! In most countries, poll workers are not professionally trained people, but are regular people who have to quickly learn how to use a system they’ll be operating for just two days, possibly in their entire lives. So we needed to keep this in mind when we tested the UX. To accomplish this, we worked with one Smartmatic employee’s mother to try out the entire experience around poll workers’ needs. We spent 15 minutes explaining how to use the tool, then asked her to repeat her actions. She stopped at the first screen. Every time she needed help, she called support — we were simulating those interactions, so that meant she called us. And she called a lot.
Seeing this, our Smartmatic colleagues immediately understood what it meant to be in the user’s shoes while also witnessing the immense load on customer service. We redesigned the UX in one of our design sprints and fixed the problems together. When we looped back to test the service with the mother again, the woman needed no training at all!
Matters: What have you learned about the role of design in elections?
Chiara: It’s fun to figure out how to fit 17 buttons for language selection in one tiny screen, but the real issue is critical usability. You don’t get a second chance with an election — it’s a one-time use case with no room for errors. We have to understand all the vulnerabilities in different contexts and how they manifest in physical or digital operations or sequences. There’s a lot of complexity and every piece of the puzzle is imperative, so we hope we can really make an impact on democracy by designing voting.
For more on our partnership, check out our case study on Smartmatic’s touchscreen A4–500 voting machine.
