User Testing
· User 1 (Election employee): Please note this test had to be done on Internet Explorer, which did not support all functionality. This is because the office had no access to wi-fi and we had to use her machine.
o She was surprised that our program had glitches on Internet Explorer, since she mentioned all offices are set up with Internet Explorer.
o Wanted to have the layout from the fix mistake menu to be the primary layout, she found the pie-chart confusing
§ She said it would be faster to see things laid out in the same order as the ballot.
o Most other comments were specific to IE glitches and are hence not mentioned here because they are concerns we addressed in our actual project.
· User 2 (Town Clerk in Concord, MA):
o Didn’t seem to understand that the main screen tutorial followed into a “fix mistake menu” – she was going through the tutorials but didn’t enter the fix mistake menu. It might be helpful if we made it clearer that the tutorial continues on that page.
o Despite going through the tutorial which states that Democratic Candidates are on the top, Republican on the bottom and others on the left, she was confused why some candidates ended up on the left.
o “Write-In, where do I do that?” She wanted a space to enter who the write-in candidate was.
· User 3 (Worker at the office of the Town Clerk in Concord, MA):
o Accidentally skipped tutorial when she wanted to go through it
o Wasn’t quite sure how to fix a mistake – originally was going for “reset ballot” but figured out to click on a candidate name before actually selecting anything. So she figured it out, it just took a moment.
o Correctly walked through fix mistake menu without a tutorial
§ Though didn’t realize you press “ok” to reset.
§ Didn’t see the “cancel” button to go back
o To fix two ballots ago, didn’t think of restart audit. Didn’t see restart audit.
§ Would prefer just changing one, thought that was more likely than the off-by-one errors we were concerned about.
§ Restarting from somewhere on this ballot on the previous one is fine, not too much
· Actually very helpful for the elderly users.
o Button placement seemed random other than blank and write-in
o “If the system ever went down, this would be much nicer than doing the hand counts”