Hi,
In March, emmapeel traveled to Ecuador and conducted moderated in-person
usability tests of the new Persistent Storage.
https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/18648
She recruited 4 women from feminist groups who had an interest in
privacy technologies but never used Tails before.
I prepared the tasks and testing image beforehand and trained her on
doing usability tests, as I couldn't travel myself this time. That's why
the tests were shorter and the tasks more basic.
We asked them to:
- Save an image to the USB stick in a way that protects it if their USB
stick gets stolen.
- Configure Tails to connect to a Wi-Fi network automatically.
See the stepped tasks here:
https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/ux/-/raw/master/persistent%20storage/tasks-software-2023.odt?inline=false
I already tested similar tasks in Brazil in August and in other
occasions in the past.
The results were very good and emmapeel did a great job on her first
facilitation :)
The good stuff:
- We didn't find any serious usability issue in the new Persistent
Storage on these basic tasks.
The fact that people don't have to restart to create the enable the
Persistent Storage and that their data (eg. Wi-Fi password) is stored
on creation made a huge difference. We knew this already but it was
great to see it live!
- In the past, there was always someone forgetting forgot to unlock
their Persistent Storage. This time, #15573 prevented this for P2.
- Nobody had troubles connecting to the Tor network.
Of course, it helped that the network had no censorship or captive
portal, but also the 2 people who chose "hiding" at first quickly
rolled back to "automatic". I think that #19166 helped with that.
- 3 participants out of 4 hesitated because of the lack of "Save" button
in the new Persistent Storage but then correctly assumed that changes
were applied automatically.
- Turning off features and deleting data was well understood.
Congrats for !1010. We didn't test any failure mode of this, though.
The bad stuff:
- Saving an image from Tor Browser is still a nightmare.
Nobody made it. That's #15678 and related issues. I'm worried to see
that the situation hasn't improved for our users since 2018 and will
push for more action on this front in 2023.
- The concept of the Persistent folder, as part of the Persistent
Storage, was not always super clear. All the new issues identified had
to do with this:
* #19642: Implement missing descriptions of PS features
* #19645: Add a placeholder file in the Persistent folder
* #19646: Persistent folder should not appear as an external device
- We didn't test the onboarding of the Persistent Storage in the Welcome
Screen (#15586) because emmapeel made people start the tasks from
Tails already. I should have clarified this beforehand.
For detailed results, see the rainbow table in attachment.
Huge thanks to emmapeel for giving a hand on this :)
--
sajolida
Tails —
https://tails.boum.org/
UX · Fundraising · Technical Writing
