“It became clear that the system was not the problem, but it was human after all.”
It’s two days after elections in Finland and it been brought up to media that somewhat 200 votes has been “lost” in our electronic voting pilot (somwhat 12 000 votes casted) that has been promised to be secure in every way. Actually I’m not surprised of this for some reason.
So, about the background of the problem: every voter who wanted to participate into this pilot had their ballot in electronic form, something similar to credit card. One should put this card to selection machine; then one needs to select the candidate with numerical input and press ok to confirm this choice. Many people have missed the part of pressing ok, causing the electronic card be blanco.
This is just design of the workflow in the application, not even related to user interface. You can verify a good solution while visiting your ATM. At least here Finland it first gives out your card and after that your money — guess why in that order?
So, what has been the reaction? Our ministery of justice stated
Osoittautui, että järjestelmä ei ole ollut se ongelma, vaan sittenkin ihminen. (source: Helsingin Sanomat)
Which can be freely translated: “It became clear that the system was not the problem, but it was human after all.” Remind me of the HAL 9000 and famous “It can only be attributable to human error.” So what goes here wrong?
The users needs are not understood and this causes poor experience and in this case failure of the system, even thought it might technically be reliable it really don’t matter. What matters is that the user is not lost; what ever hack there’s in the engine — but always assume that user can do things differently.