re: Note Section - Design Principles

A list of design principles extracted from the shared bookmarks in  
the wiki.

General Design Principles:

- Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or  
rarely needed.
- The user should be able to conveniently access more information as  
required by their level of experience.
- The cues should be displayed consistently in location and across  
sites and browsers in an attempt to prevent spoofing and confusion of  
the user.
- False positive warnings rapidly dilute warning usability.
- False positives and negatives should be kept to a minimum to avoid  
degrading the user's level of confidence in the security cue.
- The system should speak the user's language, with words, phrases  
and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.  
Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural  
and logical order.
- Provide explanations, justifying the advice or information given.
- Integrated security aligns security with user actions and tasks so  
that the most common tasks and repetitive actions are secure by  
default. Provides information about security state and context in a  
form that is useful and understandable to the user, in a non- 
obtrusive fashion.
- When possible, safe staging should be used. Safe staging is “a user  
interface design that allows the user freedom to decide when to  
progress to the next stage, and encourages progression by  
establishing a context in which it is a conceptually attractive path  
of least resistance.”
- Metaphor tailoring starts with a conceptual model specification of  
the security related functionality, enumerates the risks of usability  
failures in that model, and uses those risks to explicitly drive  
visual metaphors.
- If a feature or cue is included in the design with the intention of  
improving some aspect of usability (learnability, better  
functionality through more information ...) it must be clear to the  
user the feature is available, and the action or process expected of  
the user must be clear by the way the feature is presented.
- The visual cues presented to the user must represent the state/ 
action of the system in a way that is consistent with the actual  
state/action of the system to allow the user to create an accurate  
conceptual model.
- The user must be aware of the task they are to perform.
- The user must be able to figure out how to perform the task.
- The user should be given feedback when the state of the security of  
a page is changed.


Characteristics of the average user (is this what was meat by the  
assumptions section?)

- Security is always a secondary goal, it is never the main focus of  
a user.
- Users lack the knowledge that would help them make security  
decisions on the internet. This includes being unaware of security  
protocols and concepts, the meaning of current security cues, and the  
difference between the web content and the browser chrome.
- A user has only a single locus of attention, a feature or an object  
in the physical world or an idea about which you are intently and  
actively thinking
- Users can be visually deceived.
- Users have bounded attention.
- Users ignore warning signs, or reason them away.
- Users rely on the content of a web page to make security decisions.
- Users ignore warning signs, or reason them away.

Can anyone think of any I've left out? Any suggestions for modifying  
the ones listed?

- Maritza

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~maritzaj/