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Here are resources that provide tips and guidance, especially for those working on technical projects with a privacy component
In June 2018, Luminate commissioned Simply Secure to conduct human-centered design (HCD) research focused on uncovering grantees’ experiences of the funding process. The report highlights insights, feedback — including anonymized quotes and comments, and recommendations synthesized from 20 interviews + 53 survey responses.
Most of the time, honest conversations about sensitive topics happen between people who have known each other a long time, who've worked together, who've built up a foundation of trust. They don't happen when some unknown people cold-email you and ask to make a one-hour appointment with you – right?
Doing data handling with privacy and security in mind means spending some time to identify different threats, culminating in a threat model, and coming up with strategies that fit the particular threat model. We’ve compiled some best practices for both risk assessment and security strategies.
These are additional considerations for conducting user research involving high-risk participants. From our video series, Design Spots.
Our Design Spots video series provides quick answers to your UX questions. In this video, we talk about how to get started with Human-centered Design.
Design is all about making decisions. From a rebrand to a feature specification, from a new product to a new logo, every design change presents you with a fresh set of decisions. Personas are a way to help with those decisions.
While bigger companies have entire departments that do product design and market research, it can be difficult for smaller, distributed teams on a budget to get user feedback. We compiled a session guide to test your app with small groups, ideal for quick feedback at conferences and meetups.
We talked to Tails about user research as part of the development process.
This year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES ‘17) showcased numerous internet of things (IoT) devices but was found wanting when it came to security concerns. In his UX of IoT report from CES, Scott Jenson assesses that “companies really, really, REALLY want to make home automation systems,” but how can we begin to consider the ethics when developers don’t even consider security risks? IoT systems pose two security challenges. First, they can be manipulated as surveillance infrastructure to target vulnerable people.
In this installment of our series on resources for field research, we discuss the participant's bill of rights. Additional resources include screeners and model releases for photography. Why Consent Matters Field research such as interviews and observations are an important part of Human-Centered Design. As important as learning about first-person, lived experiences is to the design process, the act of participating in an interview can feel awkward. There is an inherent power dynamic that puts researchers in a dominant position; for all that participants know, once they share a personal story, researchers are free to use it as they please.
This post is part of a series explaining our publicly available resources for user research. The previous installment covered how to write screeners to recruit participants. This week, we discuss how to get model releases to share photos from user studies. One approach among manyAt Simply Secure, we strive to balance study participants' privacy with building empathy in an audience of developers, policymakers, and designers by sharing study photos and stories.
A screener is a questionnaire that helps researchers recruit the most appropriate participants for their user study research. Here is an example we used for our mobile messaging study in NYC. Blue Ridge Labs handled the recruiting. Most of this screener's questions are a standard part of how they work with potential participants. Our questions, in red, focus on messaging and attitudes towards privacy. Additional questions about VPN use, email, and getting online were for our Fellow Gus Andrews's research.
When you're putting your heart and soul into designing, building, or improving a piece of software, tuning in to feedback from users can sometimes get you down. Imagine waking up one morning and finding your project is being mentioned on Twitter in a slew of messages like these: Thanks Snapchat. Your app officially sucks. — Michael (@michaellorelei) April 21, 2016 The Facebook app sucks — em (@emma0wczarzak) April 19, 2016 You know, the YouTube app really kind of sucks.
Are you part of the technical team? This list of resources will help you apply a design perspective to your development work.
Last week Gus and I gave a talk at Shmoocon in DC. The focus was on helping technologists who don't have experience in human-centered design processes conduct basic research to improve their existing open-source tools. We covered four basic steps that we believe even small or volunteer teams can take: Agree on your target users Do an expert review of your UX to identify (& fix) low-hanging fruit Interview real users Build a model of your users and their needs Smooth the path for user feedback Iterate until you get it right Overall the talk was well received, with a few choice quotes making their way onto Twitter.
Our research on New Yorkers’ use of mobile messaging offers actionable insights into how to design secure communication tools for a mass audience.
Rather than view feature requests as a set of highly-divergent signals, it can help to try and group requests based on the underlying need that they speak to.
People who think about computer security for a living sometimes cringe when they read about the subject in the popular press. Security is a complex and nuanced topic, and it’s easy to make assertions that don’t hold up to careful scrutiny. One basic-but-unintuitive principle is that security is not a binary property: in the absence of other context, it’s hard to definitively say that a particular system or piece of software is “secure” or “insecure”.