ImageCast Central II
Summary
An effort to completely rebuild Dominion Voting's central ballot scanning product to provide an intuitive, modern, and transparent experience, increasing trust and reliability during elections.
Company
Dominion Voting Systems
My Role
User Research, Information Architecture, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Front-end development
Timeline
6 months
Project Goals
- Create a highly intuitive experience to improve user confidence when tabulating ballots
- Optimize the user interface for touch screen devices
- Re-platform product to utilize Qt with QML front-end
- Ensure that the product meets all compliance standards
Starting Point
The original ICC interface was designed in a time when 800x600 was the most common screen resolution and touch screens were at the leading edge of technology. While this was functional at the time, there are a number of drawbacks when the application is placed in a modern environment there are a number of drawbacks.
Discovery
- Ethnographic Research
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Information Architecture
Through supporting elections across North America, I was able to work with clients and see how the current product was being used in real world scenarios. This provided key insights into the product and allowed us to start developing ideas on how to better serve end users. This was supplemented by interviews with key stakeholders, providing a diverse range of ideas on what could be done to improve the product moving forward.
Once the initial research was done, I began revising the current information architecture and working on low fidelity prototypes to validate design decisions as they were made. As this continued, we increased the precision of the prototypes until we reached a design that we believed would provide a great experience for all users of the product.
Definition
Users with minimal training can be overwhelmed by too much information in a high stress environment
Limited visual hierarchy makes navigation and learning difficult
Ballot counting is becoming a more public process. Dated graphics reduce confidence in the system
Ideation
Some of the important findings that came from our initial research were that users often had minimal training, and that features buried within the current application were sometimes difficult to find. This led us to create strict user roles that only showed users what they needed, when they needed it.
By flattening the AI and workflow for the least trained users we tried to make a product that was simple and intuitive to use as soon as someone started. Along with clear messaging and a built in training module, this should help make managing ballot counting more effective and efficient for both officials and volunteers.
Delivery
As the first product of Dominion’s new administrative suite, the user interface would act as a guide for a number of future products. Knowing this, the goal was to create more than just a style guide, but to begin work on a design system that would allow for future products to be implemented with much greater ease.
This involved documenting all of the interactive elements, creating a reusable colour palette, and creating an icon library. Along with all of these elements, rules for their implementation were included to ensure consistency across the entire product line.
Development
By creating style guidelines and asset libraries I set a foundation from which the development team could begin to build the product. As the product was developed using the Qt Toolkit, I worked alongside the development team implementing the front end user interface using the native QML (Qt Modeling Language), a JavaScript based markup language. This allowed for close communication between the design and development teams, ensuring that the product vision was implemented to spec.
Results
Due to the nature of the election industry, product usage analytics were impossible to capture. Initial feedback from clients and users was extremely positive, however my time at Dominion Voting Systems ended before the product was used in an election.
