Preliminary Usability Assessment of the Map Interface of the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS)

I describe a preliminary usability assessment of the Election Incident Reporting System’s (EIRS) map-based incident reporting tool conducted as a final project in a graduate course on Needs Assessment and Usability at the University of California at Berkeley. I used qualitative interviews, taskbased heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough user testing to evaluate the usability of the interface. I find that while EIRS behaved remarkably well during the last election, there could be improvements in consistency, efficiency, the arrangement of visual elements and volunteer training which would deliver a smoother user experience and more functional user interface.