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UX at Tor: an Open Approach

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UX at Tor: an Open Approach
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561
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CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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How do you create privacy tools that work for people all over the world, who are fighting many different struggles for liberation? We will talk about how we empower users with open design and community help at the tor project. We'll share our process during the development of Tor Browser 8 and explain why the way we work defines the product we release. To make useful software, especially software that aims to keep people safe, it is essential to understand users’ contexts and goals. As part of our global south initiative, members of the Tor user experience and community teams traveled through India, Uganda, Colombia, and Kenya to run usability testing. We ran in-person testing of several user experience (UX) improvements in Tor Browser 8.0 with users of different technical backgrounds. We conducted more than 45 interviews that gave us an understanding of the diverse mental models and technical levels of knowledge of our users. We met people like Juana, a coffee farmer in Colombia who is part of a self-managed group of women coffee growers. The group uses Tor to communicate securely with one another. We met Jon, an environment activist and journalist in Hoima, Uganda who uses Tor to anonymously publish his blog. We learned about several threat models of the people we spoke to in Uganda. Concern about local police retaining hardware devices, and the practice of the political party currently in power seizing journalists notes and other records were common in most of those communities. In addition, this work allowed us to speak with people using our software in extreme conditions, such as poor telecommunications infrastructure, very expensive data packages or very old hardware. This helped us to understand their context, empathize, and consider solutions that work for them. We believe that Tor Browser must be usable by people without a technical background, as well as by advanced users. We want to empower our users through education so that they can have control of their browsing. We use an open design process where developers and designers work together to achieve the best solution. We use knowledge gained from our research to help us to create the most usable flow for users. We will talk about the iterations and improvements we released in Tor Browser 8: the security indicators for .onion sites, the circuit display and the onboarding for new users.
Open setOpen setMoment <Mathematik>Projective planeComputer animation
Computer networkMetric systemOpen setMoment <Mathematik>UsabilitySeitenbeschreibungsspracheLattice (order)Type theoryTrailBridging (networking)Product (business)FeedbackCartesian coordinate systemBuildingStack (abstract data type)Projective planeGoogolMetric systemValidity (statistics)SoftwareAndroid (robot)MereologyBitProcess (computing)Right angleSelf-organizationOpen setInternetworkingTelecommunicationService (economics)Musical ensembleSet (mathematics)WordComputer animation
Group actionMusical ensembleMoment <Mathematik>Data storage deviceMultiplication signFactory (trading post)Self-organizationLimit (category theory)WindowComputer fontLocal ringLine (geometry)Level (video gaming)Context awarenessTrailWeb browserUsabilityVideo gameComputer animation
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Information securityService (economics)WindowComputer iconPressure volume diagramElectronic visual displayDigital electronicsService (economics)Computer iconIterationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Expected valueMereologyWebsiteWeb browserVolume (thermodynamics)Library catalogInformation securityType theoryElectronic visual displayConfiguration spaceElement (mathematics)Connected spaceMultiplication signDefault (computer science)LiquidForcing (mathematics)CASE <Informatik>Musical ensembleTotal S.A.Touch typingXML
Web browserClient (computing)SoftwareMultiplication signTriangleResultantNormal (geometry)Computer configurationWhiteboardLevel (video gaming)Computer animation
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Session Initiation ProtocolNormed vector spaceWeb browserRevision control
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Computer hardwareProjective planeIntegrated development environmentSoftware developerSelf-organizationComputer programmingProduct (business)CollaborationismComplex (psychology)Core dumpChemical equationSoftware bugModal logicTrailLengthLocal ringProcess (computing)InformationElectronic mailing listRevision controlUniverse (mathematics)Address spaceInternetworkingState of matterOpen setWordWikiData managementSocial classMusical ensembleData storage deviceTable (information)Nichtlineares GleichungssystemRow (database)Data structureAnalogyWeb 2.0Computer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)