The lack of encryption of data at rest or in motion is one of the top 10 database vulnerabilities according to team SHATTER [72]. In the quest to improve the security landscape, we identify an opportunity area: two tools Hibernate and Jasypt that work together to provide password-based database encryption. The goal is to encourage developers to think about security and incorporate security related tasks early in the development process through the improvement of their programming system or integrated development environment (IDE). To this end, we modified the Hibernate Tools plugin for the popular Eclipse IDE, to integrate it with Hibernate and Jasypt with the purpose of mitigating the impact of the lack of security knowledge and training. We call this prototype the Crypto-Assistant. We designed an experiment to simulate a situation where the developers had to deal with time constraints, functional requirements, and lack of familiarity with the technology and the code they are modifying. We provide a report on the observations drawn from this preliminary evaluation. We anticipate that, in the near future, the prototype will be released to the public domain and encourage IDE developers to create more tools like Crypto-Assistant to help developers create more secure applications. / UOIT

This thesis project, focus on the use of Internet and new media as an online communication to improve the caregiver-pupil-school partnership. In particular the usability of the e-service is investigated by studying a real example: the Unikum system as it is used in Tierps municipality. The Unikum e-service is used in many primary schools in different municipalities in Sweden for communication and cooperation between caregivers-pupils and school. The aim is to assess the usability of the Unikum e-service in the particular context of Tierps municipality, find out about the benefits of using it, finding the problems that are there, and also to try to design solutions to improve the usability for the e-service.

Research applying eye-tracking to usability testing is increasing in popularity. A great deal of data can be obtained with eye-tracking, but there is little guidance as to how eye-movement data can be used in software usability testing. In the current study, users’ eye-movements were recorded while they completed a series of tasks on one of three e-commerce websites specializing in educational toys. Four main research questions were addressed in this study: (1) Are eye-tracking measures correlated with the more traditional measures of website usability (e.g., success, time on task, number of pages visited); (2) Are eye-tracking measures sensitive to differences in task difficulty; (3) Are eye-tracking measures sensitive to differences in site usability; and (4) How does the design of a website drive user eye-movements? Traditional usability performance measures consisted of time on task, number of pages visited, and perceived task difficulty. Eye-tracking measures included the number of fixations, total dwell time, and average fixation duration. In general, all these measures were found to be highly correlated with one another, with the exception of average fixation duration. The two groups of measures generally agreed on differences in task difficulty; tasks showing high scores on one variable (e.g., time on task) showed high results on other measures (e.g., number of fixations). Similar agreement among measures was observed in comparisons of the sites on each task. The unique contributions of eye-tracking to usability testing were best realized in qualitative examinations of eye-tracking data in relation to specific areas of interest (AOIs) on site pages, which demonstrated this to be a useful tool in understanding how aspects of design may drive users’ visual exploration of a web page. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Psychology. / "May 2005."

The purpose of this essey is through empirical methods investigate usability factors on Video On Demand applications for the Internet. More specificly we will focus on a application called Voddler. The purpose is to identify usability problems that exist in Voddler, and present the reader with suggestions on possible solutions. This could be used as guidelines to how to design for usability in this kind of system. We will use an online survey to investigate Voddler usability and use this data as a basis for our analysis. We will also conduct a expert evaluation of the system. The data collected from the survey will be compared to the expert evalutation and different theories behind usability. We will come to the conclusion that through a usability perspective Voddler has designed the software as an interactive Video On Demand service meanwhile the target audience want the application to function more like an normal computer program. This causes a conflict between the two that has to be resolved if one wants to optimize usability this kind of software.

Interaction design is about designing interactive things so that they become usable. An interaction designer’s goal is therefore to design things not only right but also to design the right things, this is called usability. In this thesis the aim is to examine how to best evaluate a user interface that is in the final design phase and that has not involved the end user in its development at all up to this stage. This thesis examined the graphical user interface of GACship III, a system used to accurately record, approve and request payment for all services/charges incurred during port/off-port calls. Three inspection methods and three test methods were investigated. This was done to determine which ones that is appropriate to use during an evaluation with little or no access to end users since this is one of the problem that GAC is facing and since this study only had access to two end users. The system, GACship III, is in the final development phase and so far the development has been made without involving the end users. A checklist for usability evaluations was developed through studying four renowned design principles in the form of Maeda’s, Raskin’s, Nielsen’s and Norman’s view of usability. The results showed that a heuristic evaluation identifies more usability problems than a digital questionnaire. Probably because the heuristic evaluation gave room for more reflections and comments and therefore turned out to be a more in depth evaluation technique. The digital questionnaire proved to be a weaker method under these conditions, but all in all, the two methods complemented each other. The results also indicated a number of usability problems in GACship III, which implied that the system is not fully efficient. The graphical user interface contained for example a severe mode error together with an unreliable drop down menu. The system consisted of parts where the usability was considered satisfactory. However, those findings will not be discussed in this thesis. In order to improve the systems usability GAC is encouraged to rectify the discrepancies. The result of the study is in addition a usability checklist that can be used during further and future graphical user interface development at GAC. Keywords: Usability, evaluation, interface, checklist, shipping.

This work describes the research conducted in the quest for designing better software for discrete-event system (DES) control. The think-aloud data from an exploratory observational study of solving DES control problems contributed to the formulation of a list of recommendations on how to design and improve DES software. These observations, together with other relevant research, led to the proposal of a novel approach to DES problem solving, namely, the template design methodology. This methodology does not require the introduction of new control theory; it is rather an reinterpretation of the existing modelling framework. Software supporting this methodology was implemented and subsequently evaluated using twelve subjects. Significant improvements in the speed of problem solving as well as positive evaluations by the subjects were observed. The usability data do not show any drawbacks to applying the methodology. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-08-21 17:11:14.991

This paper investigates the needs of a PFM (Personal Financial Management) tool in a projected banking app, where information is presented as statistics of the users’ personal economy. By studying how youths would like to monitor their finances in a banking app the paper aims to investigate what a PFM tool could include to attract consumers to use it in order to get a better control of their finances. The question of the paper is therefore: How can a banking app containing a PFM contribute to greater awareness of the users’ finances and savings, and how should such an app be designed? User tests were made to investigate what kind of statistics the users want in a PFM tool in a mobile app. The Delphi method was used to get a ranked list of ten suggestions, and a focus group interview was conducted to analyze the results further and to contribute to a qualitative view of the paper. The test results together with previous research show that a PFM tool included in a banking app could attract the target group to monitor their money, and also encourage them to save more. The respondents would like to have general statistics over their economy in a PFM tool, but also the possibility to monthly set personal budgets and monitor how well they are respected.

People store and share ever-increasing numbers of digital documents, photos, and other files, both on personal devices and within online services. In this environment, proper access control is critical to help users obtain the benefits of sharing varied content with different groups of people while avoiding trouble at work, embarrassment, identity theft, and other problems related to unintended disclosure. Current approaches often fail, either because they insufficiently protect data or because they confuse users about policy specification. Historically, correctly managing access control has proven difficult, timeconsuming, and error-prone, even for experts; to make matters worse, access control remains a secondary task most non-experts are unwilling to spend significant time on. To solve this problem, access control for file-sharing tools and services should provide verifiable security, make policy configuration and management simple and understandable for users, reduce the risk of user error, and minimize the required user effort. This thesis presents three user studies that provide insight into people’s access-control needs and preferences. Drawing on the results of these studies, I present Penumbra, a prototype distributed file system that combines semantic, tag-based policy specification with logicbased access control, flexibly supporting intuitive policies while providing high assurance of correctness. Penumbra is evaluated using a set of detailed, realistic case studies drawn from the presented user studies. Using microbenchmarks and traces generated from the case studies, Penumbra can enforce users’ policies with overhead less than 5% for most system calls. Finally, I present lessons learned, which can inform the further development of usable access-control mechanisms both for sharing files and in the broader context of personal data.

abstract: Internet browsers are today capable of warning internet users of a potential phishing attack. Browsers identify these websites by referring to blacklists of reported phishing websites maintained by trusted organizations like Google, Phishtank etc. On identifying a Unified Resource Locator (URL) requested by a user as a reported phishing URL, browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome display an 'active' warning message in an attempt to stop the user from making a potentially dangerous decision of visiting the website and sharing confidential information like username-password, credit card information, social security number etc. However, these warnings are not always successful at safeguarding the user from a phishing attack. On several occasions, users ignore these warnings and 'click through' them, eventually landing at the potentially dangerous website and giving away confidential information. Failure to understand the warning, failure to differentiate different types of browser warnings, diminishing trust on browser warnings due to repeated encounter are some of the reasons that make users ignore these warnings. It is important to address these factors in order to eventually improve a user’s reaction to these warnings. In this thesis, I propose a novel design to improve the effectiveness and reliability of phishing warning messages. This design utilizes the name of the target website that a fake website is mimicking, to display a simple, easy to understand and interactive warning message with the primary objective of keeping the user away from a potentially spoof website. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2015

When you are creating new software today, more often than not you will use API’s. Users choosing between different API’s would probably look at functionality but also accessibility and ease of use. It would therefore seem motivated for API providers to create usable and accessible API’s.This thesis is about the things that make an API more usable, and then those things are used in practice to increase the usability of CloudMe’s API. CloudMe’s core API is documented to increase usability and a wrapper for the API is developed to allow people more ways to use CloudMe’s service. The APIwrapper is created in Java and was developed thoroughly with regards to usability.