[messaging] Let's run a usability study (was Useability of public-key fingerprints)

[Tom Ritter]

On 6 March 2014 07:49, Christine Corbett Moran <corbett at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> Re: Usability of public-key fingerprints I just had lunch with a good friend
> of mine, who is a professor at my university and often does usability
> studies of information representation, including eye tracking. Her work is
> concentrated in geo-visualization, but she gave me some advice as to how
> long an experiment might take to set up, etc. She thinks the setup and
> running of a pilot would be less than a week of work, not  including data
> analysis.
>
> She's willing to do a pilot study (<10 people, <1 day) and potentially
> supervise a student to do a more extensive study, and has the intuition that
> already a pilot could be of good use for informing further design and
> implementation.
>
> What we'd need to get started is a list of methods we'd want to test, and
> some comparisons based on those methods to incorporate in the experiment.
>
> If this is something the community is interested in, we could create some
> kind of common repo to put methods, tests in, and I can show that to her as
> a first step. I don't have bandwidth for micromanaging the methods/tests
> gathering, so if we want it to happen someone else needs to take the lead
> there.

I will be happy to participate (which may turn into leading) in coming
up with methods and such.  I'll set up a github repo for this perhaps
sometime this weekend.  I know some other folks who are likely to
participate are less enamored with github, so this is their
opportunity to beat me to setting up a repo and figuring out
infrastructure. =)

Thanks so much Christine!

-tom