Actually, both Tails and the Tor Browser Bundle could benefit from a usability study.

Usability studies only help if there's development resources to make the suggestions happen. Mike and Tails should be the ones to make the call about if they have the bandwidth to take advantage of a usability study or not.

Hi, I'm Greg, I'm a PhD student at Indiana University, and I', helping supervise Vimalathithan on this project.

You're right Damian: a usability eval on it's own is not very useful to Tor.

The usability evaluation has actually been done (and was presented at HotPETS 2012[1])

What we're doing now is implementing the suggestions made in my HotPETS paper, then testing that said changes really do increase usability in a lab study. Vimalathithan (along with some undergraduates doing a capstone project) will be coding the changes suggested in the HotPETS paper, and I'll be using the resultant code to do some experiments to verify that our changes actually did increase the usability.

I had discussed this with Roger, Andrew, and a few other Tor devs while in Spain. Everyone seemed to like the feedback, but expressed your same concern - without someone to code said changes, they weren't very useful.

I told the students I'm supervising to make sure they stay connected with the development community, so that any changes we make can be more easily incorporated into the TBB if so desired, hence the email to the list.

[1] http://petsymposium.org/2012/papers/hotpets12-1-usability.pdf

-- Greg Norcie (greg@norcie.com) GPG key: 0x1B873635

On 11/6/12 6:31 PM, Damian Johnson wrote:

...

Actually, both Tails and the Tor Browser Bundle could benefit from a usability study.

Usability studies only help if there's development resources to make the suggestions happen. Mike and Tails should be the ones to make the call about if they have the bandwidth to take advantage of a usability study or not. _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev

Hi,

Damian Johnson wrote (06 Nov 2012 23:31:02 GMT) :

Runa A. Sandvik wrote (06 Nov 2012 22:44:03 GMT) :

...

Actually, both Tails and the Tor Browser Bundle could benefit from a usability study.

Thank you, Runa, for mentioning Tails here.

Usability studies only help if there's development resources to make the suggestions happen. Mike and Tails should be the ones to make the call about if they have the bandwidth to take advantage of a usability study or not.

A part of Tails that we know does need usability improvements is the tails-greeter boot menu (ticket [1]).

[1] https://tails.boum.org/todo/tails-greeter:_revamp_UI/

Some thought was given to it, and a few mockups [2] were produced. This is probably not enough foundations for a proper usability study, but it shows we do want to revamp that thing with usability in mind, and at least one of us is up to development work on it.

[2] https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2012-October/001781.html

I'm unsure if any one of us has the bandwidth needed to take advantage of a full-blown usability study, but that's clearly worth proposing and discussing. I'm thus Cc'ing tails-dev to initiate the discussion there.

(Side note: we've also had some bolder and crazier ideas that are still to be written clearly somewhere public (e.g. integrate the persistence setup within the greeter, allow persisting some greeter settings), and may be worth integrating in a usability study, whose scale would get much bigger, though.)

Cheers, -- intrigeri | GnuPG key @ https://gaffer.ptitcanardnoir.org/intrigeri/intrigeri.asc | OTR fingerprint @ https://gaffer.ptitcanardnoir.org/intrigeri/otr.asc

By Torbrowser UI they might mean the whole "anonymous browsing" experience. There are some reports of real user feedback that were posted to Tor-Talk mailing list awhile back that may give some start on the problems involved: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-January/022893.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-July/020838.html

The design documents for Torbrowser itself are at https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

The blog on the Tor website is one place to search for changes in how the various parts of the Tor experience are put together and distributed.

On Tue, 6 Nov 2012 14:20:18 -0800 Damian Johnson atagar@torproject.org wrote:

Hi Vimalathithan. By "Tor UI" I suspect that you mean Vidalia?

https://www.torproject.org/projects/vidalia.html.en

I'm not sure if it would benefit much from a usability study at the moment since development on it seems to be on hiatus (I might be wrong, Tomás would know).

On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 1:00 PM, vimalathithan vimalathithanit@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hi, I am new to this community.

A group consists of 5 members from School of Informatics and Computing, working with Professor Jean Camp on a research paper.

Our research is to carry out a case study after making changes in the UI of Tor Browser.

Could anyone here, please provide a link to learn more about Tor UI to get started with the development activities.

Also it would be of great help, if some related document are shared.

Please apologize me, if I posted my query to a wrong mailing list or my query sounds naive.

Regards,

Vimalathithan Rajasekaran

Graduate Student – Computer Science

School of Informatics and Computing

Indiana University - Bloomington

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