[tor-dev] Working on GUI

[Greg Norcie]

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 at 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 at lists.torproject.org
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
>