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Simply Secure provides thought leadership on the application of human-centered design in building information security products. Read our summaries and observations of industry functions
The Feira @ the Global Gathering is a three day social and networking festival for digital rights defenders, hosted in an outdoor space in Estoril, Portugal on September 15, 16 and 17, 2023. Join Jamie Tomasello and Eriol Fox from the Superbloom team, Matt Stempeck from Civic Tech Field Guide and Caroline Sinders from Convocation there!
With support from the Open Technology Fund Secure Usability and Accessibility Lab, UX Designers, User Researchers, Digital Security Trainers and OSS tool builders gathered at RightsCon 2023 for the Human Rights Centered Design convening. We held critical discussions about the challenges and opportunities that sharing user insights could bring to how OSS tools for human rights needs are built in ways that are more context sensitive and specific, and share these insights here
The world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age is back. After three years online, the 12th edition of RightsCon is both live in San José, Costa Rica, and online via the RightsCon platform from Monday, June 5 to Thursday, June 8 2023. Will you join us there?
Superbloom will be hosting five sessions at the Mozilla Festival (Monday, March 20 - Friday, March 24 2023). If you’ll be there, we’d love to see you, meet you and get to know you. Come join us! Want to learn how to design a Tech Policy playbook? Are you interested in global tech transparency? Would you like to find out how shadow data affects you? Do you want to understand design’s impact on encrypted messaging? Are you looking for how to center human rights in usability? Join us and 1000s of others at MozFest 2023! This year’s event will be held in person in Amsterdam and online and the Superbloom team will be participating in five of the 360+ sessions. Intrigued? Read more in our post.
Would you like to hear how the move from deceptive design to trusted patterns is critical to our shared future? Would you like to learn more about how to make encrypted apps more inclusive and accessible? Do you need on the spot design and UX aid and advice to improve your tools? Simply Secure team members will be joining six sessions during Rightscon 2022: June 6-10. We’d love to see you, learn about your work, and collaborate. Come join us!
Are you stuck on how to build or communicate a feature? Not sure how to get user feedback? Want to learn more about how the consent user experience has changed? Are you eager to find out how to navigate design choices while prioritizing human rights? Is digital infrastructure funding a topic you are keen to hear more about? Want to dive deep into data colonialism? We have some answers.
As part of 2021’s virtual Mozilla Festival, our team designed an online zine-making workshop to better simulate an in-person experience and teach new designer skills. Learn how you can design a workshop of your own.
Over the next 2 weeks, Simply Secure will be hosting five sessions at the first virtual Mozilla Festival. If you’ll be there, we’d love to see you, learn about your work, and collaborate. Come join us!
Shared learnings from the 2020 Mozilla Fellows Summit, which pivoted to a virtual convening in 10 days.
In 2019, Simply Secure piloted a residency model. Learn more about why and the fellows work.
Designers are urgently needed to help build products and services people trust. Here’s how design professionals are starting to embrace security.
One of the highlights of HybridConf 2016 was hearing writer Stevyn Colgan talk about his time as a police officer at London's Scotland Yard. He entertained the audience of UX designers and front-end developers with stories from his book, Why Did the Policeman Cross the Road?. As someone who is concerned about the state of policing (in line with recent protests in the United States), I did not expect to be impressed, but Colgan's design-thinking approach to crime prevention took me by surprise.
Last week, I encountered discussions of drones in two unimaginably different contexts: in an academic presentation at USENIX Security 2016 and on the TV comedy Portlandia. As distant genres, they offer different perspectives that have equally important UX implications for privacy preservation. In the opening keynote of USENIX Security, Dr. Jeannette Wing examined the trustworthiness of cyber-physical systems, which are engineered systems with tight coordination between the computational and physical worlds.
As you know, building great software depends on a deep knowledge of users. If you're working on a project targeted at people who operate in high-risk situations, such as activists and journalists, it can be hard to get the quality insight you need to design features and experiences that will work for them. If you're based in the San Francisco Bay area, there's an exciting event happening in July that focuses especially on user experiences for this population.
On Monday I had the pleasure of speaking at a Workshop on Cryptographic Agility and Interoperability held at the National Academies by the Forum on Cyber Resilience. The assembled group of academics, policy-makers, and practitioners touched on a variety of problems around the practical application of cryptography in production software. The main focus was on the challenges and benefits associated with cryptosystems that can be updated or swapped out over time (and thus exhibit “agility”).
For the past two years John Maeda (whose previous roles include Professor at the MIT Media Lab and President of the Rhode Island School of Design) has issued a Design In Tech Report. This influential analysis, which Maeda presents at SXSW and has also been picked up by outlets like Wired, has helped Silicon Valley understand how design is valuable to companies and their customers. It is situated in the context of venture capital, as Maeda is currently Design Partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.
I really enjoyed my time at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, Spain. I was inspired and humbled to meet so many talented people as part of a global event about internet freedom. From powerful conversations about privilege to UX design jam sessions, it was a great week. With more than 600 people registered and 160+ sessions, there was more terrific discussion than I could be part of, but here are some themes that stuck with me.
It’s always great to attend security and privacy conferences in person. But in cases where you have to miss an event, online videos of the talks can be a great way to stay current with the ongoing conversation. Art, Design, and The Future of Privacy As I promised back in September, the videos of the event we co-hosted with DIS Magazine at Pioneer Works are available online. The DIS blog had a great writeup with summaries of the different panels, and you can find transcripts over at Open Transcripts.
Last week I went to the O'Reilly Design Conference and enjoyed learning about emerging UX trends. The conference was full of high-quality presentations on UX practice. Here are three of my favorite talks. The Many Minds of the Maker Knight-Mozilla Fellow Livia Labate shared examples of how designers can overcome barriers to learning code. Her experiences from the pragmatic (no you don't need to learn Rails) to the philosophical (to be good at something, be bad at it first) are relevant to people beyond designers.
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.
Last week Simply Secure hosted a pilot workshop called Underexposed. A small group came together in San Francisco to Share successes and challenges in secure user experiences Describe processes and wishes for successful collaboration between designers, developers, and security professionals Prioritize the most important topics and audiences for outreach. We also held participant-proposed breakout sessions on topics ranging from “Making a Living” to “Privacy-Preserving User Research Metrics.” You can download a pdf of photos capturing the post it notes from the sessions.
This week we've been busy in New York City meeting with our advisors and co-hosting Art, Design, and the Future of Privacy. It was gratifying to see so many people turn out to discuss creative ways of approaching an issue that is dear to our hearts, and I know that I'm not the only one who was inspired by the work our speakers are doing. From Lauren McCarthy's crowdsourced relationships, to Sarah Ball's perspective from working as a prison librarian, and straight through to Cory's rousing call for hope and action in the era of peak indifference, the evening showed that the conversation about privacy is for more than just technologists and policy makers.
We're headed to NYC next week for our annual Advisors' Meeting. While we're there we're thrilled to be partnering with Dis Magazine to host Art, Design, and the Future of Privacy. If you're in the area, please join us; the event is free and open to the public. 7:30pm, Thursday Sept 17 Pioneer Works, Brooklyn Join cryptographers, critical theorists, architects, designers, sociologists, user experience researchers and other bright luminaries for a casual evening discussing privacy, the culture of technology, and possibilities for creative intervention in the age of ubiquitous digital tracking.
Last week I went to the SOUPS conference in Ottawa. As a first-time attendee, it was a good opportunity to connect with some members of the academic usable-security community. One of the highlights was keynote speaker Valerie Steeves. Steeves, sharing findings from her Young Canadians in a Wired World research, reported results of an in-depth study of 5,436 Canadians in Grades 4-11. Based on a survey and in-person discussions, she shared sobering findings that kids’ expectations of online privacy are not being met.
Thank you to everyone contributing to the Simply Secure Slack channel. If you’re interested in joining, email slack@simplysecure.org for an invitation. I’m especially eager to get more UX people in privacy and security involved, so spread the world. Here are some highlights from our recent Slack conversations. Sharing the Rationale for UX Decisions Check out Gabriel Tomescu’s The Anatomy of a Credit Card Form sharing the Wave design team’s process for arriving at an elegant, easy-to-use form.
I really enjoyed being part of the emerging-work track, HotPETS, at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium earlier this month. From meeting lots of great people to getting face-time with the Simply Secure team, Philadelphia was fun. Scout and I presented “Human-Centered Design for Secure Communication: Opportunities to Close the Participation Gap” as part of a session on Privacy and Human Behavior. The session also included some nice qualitative work from Tactical Technologies covering the collaborative and social nature of privacy and ethical implications for researchers working with vulnerable populations.
This is the third and final installment in the series on Lessons from Architecture School: Lessons for IoT Security. You can also read the first and second installments, or download the presentation. Thank you to the audience at Solid Conference for good questions and lively discussion. Homes Are More Than Houses Shop houses are a type of vernacular architecture built throughout Southeast Asia. Vernacular architecture is built using folk knowledge and local customs, typically without the use of an architect.
This continues Part 1 of a series of posts drawn from a talk I gave at O’Reilly’s online conference Experience Design for Internet of Things (IoT) on “Lessons from Architecture School for IoT Security.” You can find the slides for the original talk here. The talk encourages designers to think about security and outlines some ways UX design can support privacy in IoT applications. When designing IoT applications for the home, we can take advantage of how much time we spend there by looking critically at the unspoken assumptions homes reveal.
This is the first in a series of posts pulled from a talk I gave at O’Reilly’s online conference Experience Design for Internet of Things (IoT) on “Lessons from Architecture School for IoT Security.” The talk is a call to action for designers and non-technical people to get involved — with us at Simply Secure or elsewhere — in the worthy problems of experience design for IoT security. I want to encourage more people to think about security and to outline some ways UX design can support privacy in IoT applications.