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| Type | Master's Thesis |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Design and Implementation of Systems Interfaces for a Decentralized Remote Electronic Voting System |
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| Institution | University of Zurich |
| Faculty | Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics |
| Date | 2021 |
| Abstract Text | The right to vote for laws and political positions is a central part of modern democracy. While voting through post or at the voting site are still the most prevalent forms of submitting one's ballot, there exist recent efforts in taking this process online. Remote Electronic voting (REV) systems allow the voting population to submit their votes from the comfort of their own home, through internet-capable devices such as personal computers or smartphones. Casting a vote is a process of high severity, and for a lot of persons, bears emotional attachment. Recent literature and user studies on REV systems have uncovered concerns about security and privacy within the voters' mental models of casting their votes online. In most cases these concerns are covered by the software and thus don't actually form a threat to a vote's integrity. However, the system's user interface (UI) may not elicit the confidence and trust required for using the application properly while providing a positive experience. A blockchain (BC) offers several desirable properties that are striven for in a REV system such as immutability, decentralization, and transparency. However, BCs are also technical concepts for which a typical voter does not have a mental model. Thus for any REV system using BC technology, it is important to take special care with its UI design. Provotum is a BC-based REV system developed as a research project at the University of Zurich. Its latest version (3.0) received a technical upgrade and security audit, improving security, scalability, and introducing receipt-freeness. This version needs to be orchestrated in a headless fashion, meaning that there is no graphical user interface (GUI) to operate it. This thesis analyses literature in the fields of UI and user experience (UX) design both within the domain of REV systems as well as in the general realm of modern software systems. Furthermore, the usability, and lack thereof, of Provotum 3.0 is analyzed. Based on these findings, UI designs for the vote administration software and the voting software are proposed. The designs are prototypically implemented using state-of-the-art technology. Both applications are evaluated based on well-established heuristic rules as well as based on the coverage of usage scenarios. |
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