Security and Usability

Like the graph under visualizes it is an issue that as a system gets more secure, it also becomes less usable.(Microsoft) However, can we with user centered design make this graph less steep?

 

Word Cloud

I created a word cload of the most used words in my master thesis so far it looks like this:

 

Eye tracking on mobile devices

The research project (e-Me) that I am connected to at the Norwegian Computing Center have recently gotten the Tobii X60/X120 Mobile Device Testing Solution which enables you to do eye tracking on mobile devices. Because of my connection to e-Me I will get an introduction to the system and will have the opportunity to use it in my master, which I’m really excited about!

 

Pilot interview

Today I did a pilot interview with one of the participants from the probe study. Went well, but I will reformulate and add some questions before I conduct the rest of the interviews.

All of the interviewees will be people that agreed to be contacted after the joining the probe study. So they already know what the project is about, however before the interview they have to sign a form describing among other things the project, the purpose of the interview, that the data will be anonymised and that they agree to the terms.

The interviews are still focusing on peoples understanding of security and how that affect their behavior in connection to authentication. I have separated the interview into two parts, starting with some initial questions about the interviewee, then some questions about their mobile and computer habits. The second part of the interview will be used to discuss some of the results from the probes. To facilitate the discussion I have printed out some graphs, some examples of different authentication methods and some of the context pictures that I received from the probes.

 

Data gathering: probes – results 1

I have handed in all of the probes that I made, and tried to analyze the result. I have been looking for patterns and results that stand out and seen if some of the results can help me answer the research question. (This is post describes only some of the results).

As mentioned in my las blog post the study included ten students from the department of informatics. The only requirement I had was that they owned a smart phone, some had an iPhone and some had an Android. This was a qualitative research with few participant, so the results cannot be used to generalize, but does give an impression of the trends among students.

 

Data gathering: probes

One of the methods I am using to gather data is cultural probes. Probes are supposed to work as an instrument to provoke a response from the participants.

Having said that, ‘cultural probe’ is actually a very good description of what these things are about. If you think about a probe as something you send off into the unknown — typically I use the analogy of a space probe like Voyager — it’s something that goes somewhere where we can’t go ourselves and transmits back data. So ‘probe’ is a very appropriate word. (Source)

 

Mobile Media Design

Print screen of the prototype

This semester I’ve been taking a course called mobile media design at the institute of media and communication. As the course description says the goal was to be trained in exploring the possibilities for mobile media design, while gaining a basic knowledge about the main obstacles and how to overcome them, through a practical, project-based approach in which we would develop our own prototype of a mobile web application.

 

Universal Design or Multimodal User Interface?

E.g. Multimodal User Interface (biometrics) Source: http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTxKdbyRiHlgAWHTgt69iefF3Miq0kcLGKZ1DR-fhbe-ijl5oKS3EmR87_2

There are several ways of making sure that people with disabilities are included and can use a product. Two approaches are Universal Design (UD) and multimodale user interafaces.

Universal Design aims to create products that are usable to as many users as possible without the need for addoption or specialized design (CUD, 1997).

A flexible multimodal user interface can meet different users needs, abilities, situations, preferences and devices by making it possible for users to adjust the product settings based on their needs (Fuglerud 2009; Helman 2008).

 

e-Me: Sound and images becomes passwords

The online newspaper Forskning.no that cover Norwegian and international research news, recently wrote about the e-Me research project and how they have tested out using combinations of sounds or images as passwords instead of numbers or characters.

A lot of todays web services that are supposed to be accessible to all, are because of safety too advanced. This is an issue that the e-Me project have looked into and tries to solve by creating a prototype and testing it on elderly to uncover advantages and disadvantages with the different methods both for people with disabilities and other people. The different methods are also ranked by the level of usability

Read the article here. (The article is unfortunately only in Norwegian. )

This is how it can look like when the test users log on using sounds. (Illustration: e-Me-prosjektet)

 

Rappid prototyping tool: Flowella

I was introduced to the prototyping tool Flowella on a meetup with IXDA Oslo for a couple of weeks ago, Flowella is a free prototyping tool created by Nokia, and I have decided to test it out in context of my master thesis. Usually at one point in the design process I create sketches in photoshop, but photoshop in it self does not support transactions and interaction.

What Flowella does is that it allows you to drag and drop image files into a library and put them together with easy image mapping, one good thing is that you can import all sorts of images, it doesn’t need to be high-fidelity photoshop sketches, it could for instance also be images of low-fidelity sketches drawn by hand if you want the focus of the testing to be mostly on the concept and content and not on details as font or color.

When you are finished putting together your sketches you can export the file to flash, WRT or QML and test the prototype on a phone that support one of these files.

I have still not created proper sketches that I can try out, but I have tested the functionality and can confirm that it at least is really easy to use. My interests are mostly design and interaction and since my coding skills are quite poor I need a tool for prototyping that do not require me to use to much time on coding and give me more time to focus on designing for a good user experience. So far Flowella looks like tool that will allow me to do this.

Source: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com