The other day I read "Peeling the Onion’s User Experience Layer:
Examining Naturalistic Use of the Tor Browser", from Gallager and al.
http://www.damonmccoy.com/papers/GallagherCCS2018.pdf
I didn't learn much in terms of the limitations and pain points that
people experience while using Tor Browser but these 2 quotes were quite
eye-opening:
“Yeah, definitely. I didn’t know it was that. I knew that Tor was a
much more secure way to browse the Internet but I did not know that the
slowness of it was part of how it did it. Now that I know that, if for
whatever reason I wanted to make sure it was really secure, I would
definitely use Tor even though it is slower. I did not know that was a
thing!” – (P5, F, 19, interview)“
“Because, I mean, some things are worth waiting for to make sure I can
accomplish whatever I need to.” – (P7, F, 21, interview)
They are good examples of:
- How some things that are obvious to us because we understand how Tor
works, but not obvious to users unless they have a good mental model
of the underlying technology.
- How embracing and explaining some downsides of the
usability/performance trade-off might change the perception of a
pitfall from negative ("slow") to positive ("secure").
--
sajolida
Tails —
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