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

[Christine Corbett Moran]

The good news is that you don't need a partnership with an academic versed
in experiment and data analysis to run one of these.

The bad news is that it may not generalize between clients.

But if anyone wants a candidate client to do a sort of study like that I
suggest TextSecure =)

C


On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 5:13 PM, Tony Arcieri <bascule at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 4:49 AM, Christine Corbett Moran <
> corbett at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I'd like to see more studies like the Cryptocat one:
>
> https://blog.crypto.cat/2014/01/cryptocat-at-the-openitp-dc-hackathon/
>
> The area of the most confusion — to the point where it made the users feel
> threatened or panicked — was the user information screens (either for a
> specific buddy or the user themselves). *Though “fingerprint” is widely
> known by cryptography and security experts, it is, at the end of the day,
> jargon*. There were several participants who immediately associated
> “fingerprint” with a negative connotation (i.e., leaving a fingerprint at a
> crime scene). Their tone was panicked in asking their questions on this
> issue, and were unsure of why that information needed to be displayed, and
> if it was even safe to display. There were a handful of users who
> understood encryption technology at a very basic level who were not
> confused by the terminology on this page, but were unsure of what to do
> with this information.
>
> --
> Tony Arcieri
>
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