As a young first child of my parents, I had the opportunity of following my father to political campaigns. Yes, I remember vividly how I enjoyed carrying his food and water along anytime he went on political campaigns. I also recall the many times I have enjoyed chants of political songs and the sense of comradery exhibited by party members during campaigns. Growing up in an environment that was constantly filled with political conversations and party paraphernalia, I had hoped I was going to become the son of a Member of Parliament. Unfortunately, this burning desire to become the son of a Member of Parliament, mostly because of the social prestige that came with the position, never materialized because my father could not secure the required votes needed to beat the parliamentary candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), one of the two main political parties in Ghana.
I recollect with much clarity the pain that came with both defeats. Those were moments when the entire family could lugubriously go days without a shower; there was less appetite for food and no desire to even switch on the radio or television in earnest desire to avoid listening to election results or just to avoid hearing about the success story of the opponent. Our nostalgic reminiscences of political campaigns were painful to think about: the several moments we walked for miles to places which had no accessible roads; the days we left home very early and came back the following day; moments when we abandoned our campaign cars because they got stuck in mud; and several instances where we had to put up with people who verbally abused us. In both of his losses, my father was persuaded by his followers to reject the election results. These people cited instances of vote rigging, ballot box snatching, harassment of polling officers by opposing party, impersonation, and voting by minors. Against all odds, my father conceded defeat. At that young age, I said to myself that if instances cited by fatherās followers were anything to go by, then something needed to be done.
Frustrated by constant conversations about these alleged electoral malpractices, I said I was never going to vote again. Suddenly, the Electoral Commission of Ghana (EC) announced that it was going to adopt a biometric verification device (BVD) to enhance the countryās electoral process. According to the EC of the country, the biometric was going to: assist in detecting and preventing practices of impersonation and multiple voting; expose electoral offences; provide transparency in results, and make it very hard for someone to use the particulars of a different person to vote. With the representation of the biometric in such a positive light, many Ghanaians went to the polls with hopes, but little did the election management body conceive that the biometric would introduce new challenges into the electoral process.
Now imagine that you confidently walk to the polling station with hopes that you are going to register or vote only to realize that when you put your fingers on the biometric technology for authentication or verification, the biometric fails to recognize your fingers. You try again and it fails to pick your fingers. You try for the third time, but the technology indicates that you are not who you say you are. Frustrated with the technology, you give up. Which means you cannot vote. On a scarier note, imagine that you go to the polling center to vote only to realize that the only biometric technology in the voting center has broken down or batteries of the technology were constantly draining because the technology performs poorly under dusty, hot, or humid weather conditions. Or, that the biometric has broken down because election officials did not obey instructional procedures. As if these breakdowns were not enough, the printers used during the elections also started breaking down because they could not take the pressure. The consequence of these breakdowns or rejections was that people were disenfranchised. An EC official I interviewed, for instance, indicated that:
then come election day it broke down, some people couldnāt use it, some people had to use the manual registration which was outside the law and in fact some people got disenfranchised because the machines broke down and when it was rescheduled not all people were able to come back so these were the initial problems with the use of the deviceā¦When you take the verification device, for example, the printers were just breaking down like that because they could not take the pressure. If you start printing, you print 1, 2, 3, 4 then the printer breaks downā¦ the BVD failed and Superlock Technologies Limited (STL), the technicians, also blamed it on humidity, high temperature.
If you happen to be near or in the center of this scene, how would you feel? These anecdotes indicate that the biometric technology broke down on several levels: (1) biometric performed poorly because it could not withstand the heat in Ghana; (2) the machine could not read the fingerprints of some voters; (3) training in biometric use didnāt really help since most users struggled to use the technology on election day; and (4) user instruction manual was confusing. Realizing the severity of the problem, the EC and voters started adopting local measures to salvage the situation: Those who were rejected were asked to use Coca-Cola, local herbs, and detergents such as OMO to wash their hands, and canopies were used in some polling stations to control the temperature.
The biometric breakdowns in Ghana reveal that designing for global use is challenging. Designing for global users means thinking about the broader context within which a product or technology will be used. Broader context, as I use in this book, acknowledges a relationship between weather conditions (or physical environment), the space, location and place of technology use, the users of the technology, how the technology will be used, what situation will trigger the adoption and use of the technology, the needs of the users, and when it will be used. This means there is a need to understand that ācontext is not about a superficial interaction. Itās about deep engagement [with] and an immersion in the realities and the complexities of our contextā (Douglas, 2017) . Thinking about and engaging in these broad contextual issues have proven to be daunting tasks for designers, because in most cases the designers of technologies we use do not even know which user will purchase their products and how those users will even put the technology to use. In the same way, in most cases, users do not know the designers of the technology they purchase and use. For instance, the EC officials of Ghana did not have any knowledge of the company which designed the biometric technology in use.
It is thus an established fact that a designer may never meet or know about users of the technologies they design. This bitter truth is tacitly expressed by Jonathan Colman, a experienced product user and content strategist, when he revealed one of several āwicked ambiguitiesā UX officials encounter...