Are you part of the technical team? This list of resources will help you apply a design perspective to your development work.
Many regular readers of our blog have already drunk the metaphorical Kool-Aid. You know that a good user experiences is critical to an app's success; moreover, you know that when a piece of software seeks to preserve its users' privacy, a poor UX can have disastrous results. But working in a community of passionate individuals – whether it's as a designer, a cryptographer, or an internet-freedom activist – can make it easy to forget that the majority of the human race isn't aware of your favorite issues.
The news this week has been full of stories about Apple's resistance to a court order demanding they build a custom backdoor to a phone used by one of the San Bernardino suspects. While I will leave deep analysis of the legal situation to experts of that domain, I believe that this instance holds valuable lessons for all software teams. One lesson in particular helps us understand why the creation of such a backdoor would inevitably become dangerous for innocent users.
Messaging with friends and colleagues is rewarding – but sharing contact information is awkward. Many people want to preserve their privacy by carefully controlling who gets their contact information, and choose not to broadcast their email address or phone number via a public Facebook or Twitter profile. Instead, they choose to strategically share their contact info. It's awkward to navigate the social and UX challenges in this sharing. Looking at how WeChat and LinkedIn handle this problem exposes two different kinds of awkwardness: mechanics of sharing and social agreement about what permissions you get as a result.
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.