Case study: Department of Defense: SERVE

The Department of Defense, SERVE: The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment

The Department of Defense envisioned using Internet technology to securely and efficiently address the absentee voting needs of deployed military personnel and expatriated civilians who would otherwise vote via mail-in ballots. SERVE -- an ambitious experiment in e-democracy was initially restricted to fifty US counties in seven states. The project had been running for over a year when Siteworx was brought on board to attend to Section 508 compliance for the Web application.

Design

The first-generation SERVE application was rapidly created by a large number of developers working in parallel. The resulting application was found to be inconsistent, difficult to navigate, and very difficult for novices and experienced users alike. The major firms involved recognized that usability engineering provides important benefits in terms of cost, product quality, and user satisfaction. Siteworx's user-centered design approach focuses on the users of an application and the tasks they need to accomplish.

Technology

The Department of Defense presented Siteworx with a distinct set of application enhancement objectives. Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology be accessible to people with disabilities. Inaccessible technology interferes with an individual's ability to obtain information quickly and efficiently. Using Section 508 Compliance standards, Siteworx refactored over 100,000 lines of the SERVE application's source code to create the first ever completely autonomous voting method for people with print disabilities. Enhancing SERVE required a unique brand of technical and design expertise. Siteworx delivered compliant source code that utilized Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control most of the layout, color and font schemes.

Process

While an efficient and engaging user interface is essential to a positive user experience, Siteworx recognizes the need to enhance the user experience even further by providing quality performance support tools. Siteworx took on the task of developing a comprehensive online SERVE Help System that provided users "just in time" access to information from within SERVE pages. Users could access information to the depth needed whether it was simply to view procedural steps about how to complete a SERVE page or to view more comprehensive information about how to handle a specific business process with SERVE. Armed with the simple-to-access Help System, even the most novice user would be able to easily move through the application. VeriSign was so impressed with the design and user-friendly writing style of Siteworx Help System, they employed us to write the help components for their portions of SERVE.