Recent attacks by Daesh in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, and Paris have fanned the flames of an ongoing debate about software that is resistant to surveillance. It seems that some participants in that debate are trying to use these attacks as an excuse to drum up fear around end-to-end encryption. They argue that these events tell us that the general citizenry shouldn’t have access to strong privacy-preserving tools. A lot of people are saying a lot of smart things on the subject, but I want to briefly outline a couple ways in which this call for limiting encryption is problematic.
Style guides specify the look and feel of how a company or team communicates with the outside word. Styleguides.io collects examples of website visual standards that maintain a consistent online presence. Brand guidelines typically focus on how logos are treated, while style guides are more extensive – including not only look and feel, but also interactive behavior, such as the alerts and form templates in the U.S. Web Design Standards.
My recent post describing some of the reasons we choose Slack over IRC for our public forum is part of a larger conversation people are having around the promise and concerns of group-communication tools. A quick search for "Slack vs. IRC" yields a wealth of opinions on the subject; our post generated some interesting discussion (and a couple angry rants on Twitter). I focused my discussion on the usability advantages of Slack – advantages that I believe encourage designers to join our public forum in a way that they would not if it were hosted on IRC.
Users of the Facebook iPhone app were recently surprised by a new feature offering to “Add the last link you copied?” into a status update. Many people did not expect to see a complete URL that they had put onto the clipboard from another app, without explicitly involving Facebook. Christian Frichot discusses iOS security concerns with this feature, but I also consider this to be a UX design failure. Copying a link in Safari (left) makes it appear in Facebook (right).
Last week Simply Secure hosted a pilot workshop called Underexposed. A small group came together in San Francisco to Share successes and challenges in secure user experiences Describe processes and wishes for successful collaboration between designers, developers, and security professionals Prioritize the most important topics and audiences for outreach. We also held participant-proposed breakout sessions on topics ranging from “Making a Living” to “Privacy-Preserving User Research Metrics.” You can download a pdf of photos capturing the post it notes from the sessions.