Digital Deliberation: Searching and Deciding About How to Vote Scott P. Robertson
Drexel University College of Information Science and Technology Philadelphia, PA 19147-2875 USA +1 215-895-2476
[email protected] ABSTRACT
This paper summarizes a new NSF-funded research project to study and develop an online portal that supports voter deliberation and decision making. User-centered design methods with varied population groups will be employed to develop features and test prototypes of a voter portal.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces—User-centered design; prototyping; H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and organization interfaces—Web-based interaction. K.4.1 [Computers and Society]: Public policy issues Figure 1. A Voter Portal would filter and sort political information from the Internet and allow users to browse, compare, annotate, and share opinions about items.
General Terms
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors
Keywords
In this project, people will be observed closely as they use digital materials to make voting decisions. A series of empirical studies using real online materials in mock voting exercises will examine user behavior in this domain. Information gathered in the empirical studies will be used to help design a Voter Information Portal (Robertson, 2005) that organizes political information for citizens and helps them make decisions. The portal will use Internet information found by commonly-used search engines and allow voters to reorganize it into user-centered categories, annotate it, and share it. Issues of privacy and ethics in this context will be examined.
Digital government, electronic voting
1. INTRODUCTION
A considerable amount of political activity is moving onto the Internet. This includes information dissemination by candidates, parties, issue advocates, campaigns, governments, news and opinion media, and individuals, all of which is directed at citizens and potential voters. It also includes active participation by citizens in interactive digital environments mediated by social software such as blogs, opinion forums, discussion groups, etc. While there has been considerable study of the large scale demographics of this movement primarily using survey methods, there have been few “close up” studies of individuals involved in digital democracy using experimental and observational methods. There has also been a lack of empirical user studies in support of the design of software interfaces to support digital democracy.
2. PRELIMINARY STUDY
An experiment was recently completed which tested the use of a portal. Participants completed a mock voting exercise in which they studied real campaign materials for historical elections with which they were unfamiliar (a California Senate race, a California Secretary of State race, and a California ballot proposition) and then voted electronically. Information Presentation was varied, with subjects receiving the materials on paper in one condition and via an electronic portal in another condition. In the Paper condition, materials were organized by categories into notebooks with indexes and tabs. In the Electronic condition, materials were organized by the same categories visible in navigation hyperlinks. Crossed with the Information Presentation factor was a Ballot Integration factor. In Ballot-Integrated conditions the electronic
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After the election, a survey of users will be conducted to assess usability, interest in using a real working system in future elections, and concerns.
ballot was available during the information searching phase whereas in the Ballot-Not-Integrated condition the ballot was only available after information search To summarize the results: •
The notebooks never had any advantage over the electronic portal, and the portal seemed to help people use the materials more easily and quickly. The ease of use of the portal may have contributed to a better understanding of the materials.
•
The availability of the ballot during information browsing never had any advantage, and in fact subjects found it easier to complete their tasks of studying materials and deciding on their choices when voting took place after the study phase.
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The enhancing effect of separating browsing and voting was greatest, as measured by “ease of making a final decision” ratings, when the electronic portal was being used.
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There are strong order effects in information browsing and thus the design of an information portal will influence how voters study and learn about issues.
4. CONCLUSION
Putnam (2000) argues that U.S. culture is undergoing a largescale loss of “social capital,” or interpersonal networks of trust and knowledge. This project may infuse some components of social capital into the electoral decision making process by supporting browsing, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. It may help voters to organize their information seeking behaviors and integrate them during the decision process leading up to elections. Researchers and developers should work against the development of an electronic voter support system that leverages the “digital divide” to further exclude people who are not well integrated into the socioeconomic fabric, and that further exacerbates the problem of alienation by not including community-building components. By taking a contextual, user-centered perspective we have an opportunity to affect the democratic process in the future. The design of electronic voter support systems must be informed by an HCI-perspective which includes an understanding of users, broadly defined user behavior (including affective, cognitive, and collaborative behaviors supporting information gathering and decision making), and context.
These results are consistent with a view that voters wish to separate study, deliberation, and choice making from voting, perhaps because voters wish to maintain a minimal cognitive load by focusing on one thing at a time. Once voters begin the process of casting the ballot, they prefer to have their choices already made. If they browse and vote at the same time, they will “chunk” their activity such that all deliberation about a particular issue or candidate is finished and the vote cast before moving on. The need to manage cognitive and memory load factors may be even greater when a portal is being used to the degree that the portal itself contributes to cognitive load either because of its design or the amount of information that it can present in a short time.
Democratic government, and the technologies that will support it in the future, need to be led by the needs and requirements of citizens, not by the capabilities and features of emerging technologies. There is considerable research in political science, psychology, and sociology on political decision making. There is less research on how these learning and deliberation processes are transferring as new digital information sources and virtual deliberation tools become available to citizens. The goal of this research is to shape new technologies for democracy as they emerge.
3. PROPOSED STUDIES
In a set of studies over the next three years, the investigators will examine the conceptual categories that people use to understand political information, browsing and decision making strategies, and personalization. Another set of studies will examine more social uses of digital information. Questions include interest in sharing profile information, annotations, and opinions with others, impact of shared information on decision making, and the interaction of privacy and information sharing. All studies will compare participants from diverse backgrounds and situations. In each case there is a preliminary study based on a participatory design method (Schuler & Namioka, 1993) such as the focus group which is then followed by an empirical, mock voting study.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number IIS-0535036. Thanks to Palakorn Achananuparp, Jim Goldman, Sang Joon Park, and Nan Zhou for their work on this project to date.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Alvarez, R.M. & Hall, T. 2004. Point, click, and vote: The future of Internet voting. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. [2] Putnam, R. 2000. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
A practical outcome of these studies will be design concepts for a political information browsing portal that supports all of these activities. A series of user-centered prototyping sessions (Alvarez & Hall, 2004) will be carried out with the goal of producing a usable political browser prototype by the end of the second year. The last year of the proposed project period (2008) is an election year. A prototype system will be in place early in the year and made available to a large number of voters of varying backgrounds via the Internet. Portal users will be volunteers who agree to have their usage behavior monitored (anonymously).
[3] Robertson, S. 2005.Voter-centered design: Toward a votercentered decision support system. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 12(2), 263-292. [4] Schuler, D. and Namioka, A. (Eds.). 1993. Participatory design: Principles and practices. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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