For decades, literature has reported on the perceived conflict between usability and security. Their mutual trade-off needs to be considered and addressed whenever security products are developed. Achieving well-balanced levels of both is a precondition for sufficient security since users tend to reject unusable solutions. To assess it correctly, usability should be evaluated in the context of security. This paper aims to identify and describe universally applicable and solution-independent factors that affect the perceived usability of security mechanisms. The selected methodology was a systematic literature review during which multiple database resources were queried with different search terms. Application of predefined selection criteria led to the creation of an initial bibliography before backward snowballing was applied to minimize the risk of missing further material of importance. All 70 included publications were then analyzed through thematic analysis. The study resulted in the identification of 14 themes and 30 associated sub-themes representing aspects with reported influence on perceived usability in the context of security. While some of them were only mentioned sparsely, the most prominent and thus presumably most significant ones were: simplicity, information and support, task completion time, error rates, and error management. The identified novel themes can increase knowledge about factors that influence usability. This can be useful for different groups: end-users may be empowered to choose appropriate solutions more consciously, developers may be able to avoid common usability pitfalls when designing new products, and system administrators may benefit from a better understanding of how to configure solutions and how to educate users efficiently.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:his-18511 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Lennartsson, Markus |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Skövde, Institutionen för informationsteknologi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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