Dr. Michael Byrne
Usability Barriers to Voting
The 2000 election revealed many issues in how our nation
executes its fundamental democratic process, voting. One
of the key steps in the voting process is the communication
of the voter's intent to the ballot itself. As anyone who
has ever forgotten an attachment to an email message knows,
sometimes the user interface leads to difficulty in getting
the in-the-lead intent recorded correctly. For the 2004
election, a nonprofit organization collected more than 20,000
"incident reports" of difficulties people ran
into when trying to vote. Many of these incidents involve
the voting technology itself and at least hundreds of them
relate to usability. We would like to try to extract from
this database a taxonomy of usability issues reported in
an effort to gain a clearer picture of the usability landscape
in voting and possibly inform standards for voting system
certification.
Interruptions in Memory Retrieval
What are the basic atoms of human cognition? As it turns
out, many simple performance parameters about human memory
are not well-understood. Previous research indicates that
even very simple operations such as recalling the product
of two single-digit numbers can be interrupted by a higher-priority
task, but at some cost to performance. This project is aimed
at understanding the relationship between the characteristics
of the interrupting task and that cost. Opportunities for
involvement in this project range from brainstorming about
properties of the interrupting task to implementing the
tasks to data collection and analysis.
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