Last fall, while filling out the tiny ovals on my mail-in ballot for the state of Florida, I found myself questioning everything. As I scanned Question 4, I read, “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion” followed by the description, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health,” followed by a whole lot of technical and political jargon I could not understand and ending with a simple “Yes” or “No” choice.
Yes or No? I had absolutely no idea what voting “Yes” or “No” actually meant. Yes, no law should force patients into having a baby when it could kill them? Yes, the government should limit its interference with abortion? Or no, the government should not increase its interference with abortion?
I couldn’t help but feel sheer frustration. I, as a native English speaker, could not understand what I was exercising my right to vote on. And to think that, as of 2023, 30.8% of Florida residents do not speak English as a first language.
This phrasing on my ballot wasn’t just frustrating; it was a sign of a design failure with real consequences for democracy. Poor design in voting and government systems creates barriers that prevent citizens from fully participating in the democratic process. When accessibility is ignored, entire communities can be left out of decisions that may have a genuine and direct impact on their lives.
Human factors engineering is all about designing systems that are easy, safe and accessible for everyone. It ensures that people of all backgrounds, abilities and experiences can use technology and services effectively. Here at Tufts, Human Factors Engineering is a growing program that brings together engineering and psychology to improve how we make products and provide services while keeping the user in mind.
As David Miller, assistant teaching professor of mechanical engineering, wrote to me, “Human factors is the field that touches everyone but most people don’t know about. Are you sitting down? How did the designers know what the geometry of the chair should be? ... How readable is the typeface selected for this article you are reading right now? These are human factors questions!”
Despite the importance of accessible design and the presence of HFE principles in most modern technology, many critical systems remain unnecessarily difficult to use. If a ballot is confusing or a voting machine is malfunctioning, people cannot vote on their own terms — a right that was given to them as part of being a citizen of this country. A myriad of consequences may result from a poorly designed ballot, including wrongly voting for specific candidates, which can lead to overvotes or undervotes, as well as ballot roll-off.
Poor ballot design can even bring about major election controversies. Take the “butterfly ballot” used in Florida during the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Its layout was so confusing that many voters accidentally selected the wrong candidate, resulting in a recount and a highly disputed election outcome.
Beyond ballots, civic technology systems, like government websites, also have a duty to be accessible. These digital infrastructures are often a major point of contact between the public and their government, and their design choices can determine whether someone feels empowered or excluded.
Yet, far too often, these platforms are confusing, outdated and built without the user in mind. Accessibility in this context does not just mean compliance with online disability standards — it means designing for urgency, clarity and emotional distress.
A powerful example of this failure lies in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement website. In today’s political climate, fear surrounding ICE actions is not abstract; it is immediate and personal for many communities.
Families and friends often scramble to find loved ones who have been detained, only to be met with a convoluted website that buries the Online Detainee Locator System under layers of unrelated navigation. To even reach this system, users must first know to click into “Attorney Information Resources” and then locate it within a dropdown menu. A system like this should be visible directly on the ICE homepage, easily accessible with clear language and translation options and designed for rapid use under emotional stress. This is not just a human factors problem; it’s a democratic one. When people cannot access the information they need from their government, they are effectively denied the right to engage with it.
Inclusive design is a core pillar of HFE, as an accessible experience can only be well-created when designers account for the users who will partake in that experience. HFE ensures accountability through the various user research methods that are vital to it, such as usability testing — a process that involves a diverse set of users testing out every feature of a product or service and a facilitator taking live notes on areas of confusion.
Noting which parts of an experience are difficult for users leads human factors engineers to know exactly which pain points need to be resolved in future iterations of design for that product or service. This guarantees that important systems, including ballots or public government websites, work for everyone — not just those who are highly literate or familiar with voting jargon.
Tufts students studying HFE have the opportunity to make a real impact in this space. By applying their skills, they can help shape the future of accessibility in modern technology, especially in spaces that have such an influence on our democracy.
