Re: best practices for user friendly and secure forgotten password resolution
Jared Spool <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.org.user-groups.bay-area |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Aug 26, 2009, at 5:54 PM, Greg Austin wrote: > Security may be a necessary evil for some sites, but it has yet to > be proven pleasurable. Sorry about coming to the conversation a little late. Security, as applied to interface design, is about "selective usability." The idea is simple: You want a system to be completely usable for the people who deserve access to it (aka "good guys"). You want it to be completely unusable for the people who should not have access to it (aka "bad guys"). As long as the system can tell one from the other, it works great. Where the usability of security becomes problematic is when the system can't tell if the user is a good or bad guy. Here, we have much work to do. None of the solutions, to date, have proven to be really working for either. Either they are too onerous for the good guys or too lax for the bad guys. Striking the perfect balance is really hard. Good design, when achieved, becomes invisible. The fact that security interfaces are very visible makes them suspect as well-formed design solutions. We'll know we've achieved an ideal model when the security elements are invisible to both good and bad guys, while doing their jobs perfectly. (At the point it becomes invisible, it will be pleasurable for the good guys. I don't think it will ever be pleasurable for bad guys.) I know, for a fact, that there is important research happening in this area right now. I believe we'll see some interesting improvements over the next few years. But, I believe it won't be fast. This is a tough nut. Jared Jared M. Spool User Interface Engineering 510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845 e: [email protected] p: +1 978 327 5561 http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: @jmspool _______________________________________________ This is the BayCHI Discussions mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription options, or to unsubscribe, visit http://baychi.org/mailman/listinfo/discussions