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UX at Tor: an Open Approach

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UX at Tor: an Open Approach
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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.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Our next speaker is Antonella from The Torque Project and she's gonna tell us how The Torque Project was designed and their open project, please Antonella.
My name is Antonella, I'm from China. We've been traveling and working around the world for the past seven years. I'm quite tired now, and unfortunately
I've been leading the UX team at The Torque. The UX team at The Torque Project works across all the teams. We work with the applications team, building Torque for Android and Torque for desktop. We work with the community team,
traveling around the world in something that we call the Global South Initiative. I will talk a little bit about that later. Meeting human rights organizations and internet freedom people around the world. We work with the communication teams on things like
end of the year campaign and raising money. We work with the metrics team, finding a way to show our open data and easy for users. We work with the network team also to improve the access to any service. The foundation of The Torque Project
are based on creating technologies that respect users. I really like this pyramid from the India team. It's very easy because Torque technology it's like covering the base part.
Technology is decentralized, it's private, it's open, it's an integral problem, it's a cure, and we try to make it simple. Both of the Torque is something that we are trying to focus on. We respect users in all the states.
Our approach to usability is being on respected and useful data, we try to place where we use data like the industry does.
It's very hard, but it's very rewarding too. Torque is open. We have meetings on ERC, you can read everything what we do. If you type Antonina in our track bar you can see what I have been doing the last month.
People who came to our meetings it's people like sometimes it's anonymous, so we work with people who sometimes we know who they are, sometimes we don't. And it is pretty nice. And the product we build,
a topic from OpenDesignkey.org which explains basically our process. This is very nice, but the process often is something like this. Steam works more like a bridge.
We try to tell user stories that make sense for a user, and we try to improve our products and our technology to make them usable for our end users. It's in the world, we have people collecting feedback
from a lot of channels, Reddit, Stack Overflow, our backtrackers, Google Play, everywhere. We work together on paradise and we try to also discuss based on sponsors, validate.
We focus on connecting with communities located in the global south. If you make a line in a map among these you will find countries like Colombia,
Uganda, Kenya, and India. We travel there, we meet people, we talk with them. We see how poor infrastructure is. We see how expensive it's accessing to internet there. We see how oppressive governments are ruling these countries.
And this allow us to understand our users context. As I said before, we don't track users like the industry does, so the only way we have to understand our user needs is to talk to them.
First in academic organization, we have a lot of working groups researching our tour everywhere. I'm happy that we have more and more people interested in usability because academic research quite validates our assumptions. We apply that in real life.
Last year we launched tour browser eight. We will say that this is the year to break tour. So it's nice. For full and all, tour browser limits fingerprinting
by normalizing different features that can track you. Like your window size, the fonts you use, the localization you have, the more people who is using tour that look the same, stronger tour is.
This is by design. User experience for that needs to be a priority. If you have more people using tour, it's better for everybody. This tour browser eight release was launched last year.
It was a match for release focusing on U.S. I think the users we have here. Since you remember the green about page, we changed it. So I'm really happy when we arrived.
As I said, this was a match for release focused on end user experience, and I think it's very good.
The story about some features we have been working with. One of them is secure expectation for our new services. When you visit the new services before, you don't have any clue about your security. When I talk about security, I'm talking about this tiny little icon that you have in your bar. We have been working on that,
and 7.4 doesn't have anything. On the best cases, you have nothing, but on the worst cases, you have like a red lock, which is something like it's not real because the new services are often more secure than HTTP sites. There are some iterations that we made.
We have volume catalogs for different type of audio configuration. This is super technical. If you want to know more about that, I can talk later, but I don't want to annoy you. We can see. Another thing we improved was the SQL display. The SQL display is a new element that for sure
makes part of the Tor browser experience. It tells users how the Tor connections have been made. We have several problems before. The SQL display, this is important. The Tor browser has first-party installation by the phone.
That means that each time you open the browser, renders a new SQL for you. So basically, this SQL works for that and for cellular visiting. So this is why we moved T-shirt with display from the Tor button, which was like in every day. So they can't present a lot longer,
which is pretty much sense because it works this way. We've been working with our onboarding.
People who are writing their browser for first time has the browser doing, but then during our initial research, we found that people open the browser and say, whoa, this is a normal browser. Yeah, for sure. So what we try to do is to explain Tor work,
how the browser can protect them on network level, on client level, and on devices.
So we try to match features with desktop and with mobile phone. It's very hard, but we are trying to do that.
I was loose on the browser calendar. We made it. Localization, the browser have learned in 24 languages.
I think it's nice because Erin's doing it. We know that localization is critical to reach end users. End users doesn't have technical background. Maybe they don't even speak English. So we really want to reach more abroad users. And localization is critical.
How to contribute to the project? As I said, all our works open, so you can come to our meetings. There are a lot of things to do. You can't imagine. So if you are a designer and you have some hours and you are interested to do that, please ping me. I really have to explain how to join us.
Up here, the new version of the browser.
Show you some things I have here. And you can download the browser alpha, which is new. If you want to try it, if you find bugs,
please record them tomorrow.
So if you are a technical person and you want to collaborate with the network, you are. I don't know, but if you check Twitter, you will see. I think it's 3 p.m. on Sunday.
On Sunday. Collaborate. It's the size of the tech team and the design team. And what tools do you use to communicate between designers?
And because you don't know each other, which kind of tools do you use? The third team we have. Sorry, which tools we use to communicate and to work in between teams. We work remotely.
We are an open team. We have a core team, which is only about the third process foundation. And then we have a community, which is huge. We collaborate with that. Basically, we use IRC for the navigation. For all schools. On the site, specifically, we have track.
We have bugs. Bug tracker, so we can collaborate. We have open discussions or track tickets. Tools. Do you want to know design tools? I'm using Sketch. It's not open, but it's something that works.
The size of the team. It's really on me. We are, yeah, the team is very small. We have a localization manager who help us to connect with localization labs to provide these
localization versions of our products. We have a developer who then develops content developers to help us to build something. Often we work one on one with developers. I mean, I have been doing the last improvement,
so I have been working personally on that. And we work one on one with developers. You mentioned you did some research on developing nations. I was wondering if they were, I mean, besides the infrastructure issues, were there any findings particular to the use of those contexts?
There are no besides infrastructure issues. I mean, there are a lot of issues, but infrastructure and access to web, to the internet, it's like critical. Our idea is that if we can make works on places where internet is like super expensive,
where data is like expensive, where infrastructure is poor, where hardware is poor, then making that work in the north is very easy. So localization help us to find metaphors to explain difficult concepts because
it starts with difficult technology to explain for people who doesn't have technical background. So the localization help us a lot to find the words to explain, not to teach people who are also end users to understand what is happening.
On our track, it's wiki.oprocha.org. You have seen, you have more information about our user research program. As I said, Top Project is an NGO. We are founded by organizations. We have this program where we travel
to global south countries. We meet people in person and this is critical for our work. Basically because even if I want to track users in the roads, then I can't. I don't know who is on the other side. We can't do that. It's challenging because it's like
I'm coming from the commercial world and now I'm here and it's like one step more of difficulty.
We have super technical users who have been using Tor so far.
When I say Tor, I'm talking about products. I mean, I'm talking about Tor products. We want to make this technology available for people who doesn't have technical understanding because very often, people who must need this technology is people who live in a present environment and it's people who doesn't have
the technical background to understand that. So we should balance what we are explaining and what we are not. Often we want to explain everything. We really believe that we can empower users through education and if we can explain complex concepts in easy way, people can understand.
We really believe that users should opt in and opt out of things. So it's a balance between technical users and non-technical users. I'm focused on end users that are not technical and this is what we are trying to do. I mean, all this year, this technology has been made for super techy people.
It's fine. It's necessary. It's a process. But I think it's important to reach more people. I think I'm starting to talk in length.
From my opinion, you are doing a very good job actually in the 90s with you. I'm a divergent in a company, an academia,
to the 90s with a person in the class. So two questions. One question is, is it already in development in the 90s in New York? The university is at the same list as the other world resource projects.
I think you have a very similar approach. Why don't you publish your work tomorrow? Thank you. As I said, our project launched on, I think, October or November. We have people in universities like Princeton and New York University.
They have research in the world of technology. It's going to be fetched in a few months. So there are people writing about this improvement. I don't know if they are measuring what we have been missing two months ago. But some problems we have in addresses
are problems that have been running or absorbed from a lot of people. So, I mean, it was just the first step in making this usable. I'm really looking forward for the next version. We really need to close at nine. And I hope we have a kind of research
running questions about what we are doing. About what we are doing. I'd say that we keep past this wide information. If you want to read more, you can find it there. This place is a good place to share experiences and how we are working. And if we are a direct-color project, I mean, we work with the state people also.
We decided to research on end users without tracking them. So, yeah. I hope it is very extra sure. How we work.