Convergent usability evaluation: a case study from the EIRS project.

Two non-profit organizations developed a Web application to help monitor U.S. elections: the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS). The mostly-volunteer team had only four months to develop a workable system. The aggressive schedule, limited budget, and distributed team-structure challenged us to find creative ways to evaluate and improve EIRS' usability. We used an approach that combined expert UI review with opportunistic exploitation of venues for gathering data on EIRS' usability. This approach, which we call convergent usability evaluation, had, in the non-profit environment, advantages over the more formal methods typically used for commercial projects. In this paper we describe the usability evaluation methods we used for the EIRS project and discuss how they converged to provide a more complete picture than we would have obtained by conventional methods.