84 research outputs found

    Behaviour-aware mobile touch interfaces

    Get PDF
    Mobile touch devices have become ubiquitous everyday tools for communication, information, as well as capturing, storing and accessing personal data. They are often seen as personal devices, linked to individual users, who access the digital part of their daily lives via hand-held touchscreens. This personal use and the importance of the touch interface motivate the main assertion of this thesis: Mobile touch interaction can be improved by enabling user interfaces to assess and take into account how the user performs these interactions. This thesis introduces the new term "behaviour-aware" to characterise such interfaces. These behaviour-aware interfaces aim to improve interaction by utilising behaviour data: Since users perform touch interactions for their main tasks anyway, inferring extra information from said touches may, for example, save users' time and reduce distraction, compared to explicitly asking them for this information (e.g. user identity, hand posture, further context). Behaviour-aware user interfaces may utilise this information in different ways, in particular to adapt to users and contexts. Important questions for this research thus concern understanding behaviour details and influences, modelling said behaviour, and inference and (re)action integrated into the user interface. In several studies covering both analyses of basic touch behaviour and a set of specific prototype applications, this thesis addresses these questions and explores three application areas and goals: 1) Enhancing input capabilities – by modelling users' individual touch targeting behaviour to correct future touches and increase touch accuracy. The research reveals challenges and opportunities of behaviour variability arising from factors including target location, size and shape, hand and finger, stylus use, mobility, and device size. The work further informs modelling and inference based on targeting data, and presents approaches for simulating touch targeting behaviour and detecting behaviour changes. 2) Facilitating privacy and security – by observing touch targeting and typing behaviour patterns to implicitly verify user identity or distinguish multiple users during use. The research shows and addresses mobile-specific challenges, in particular changing hand postures. It also reveals that touch targeting characteristics provide useful biometric value both in the lab as well as in everyday typing. Influences of common evaluation assumptions are assessed and discussed as well. 3) Increasing expressiveness – by enabling interfaces to pass on behaviour variability from input to output space, studied with a keyboard that dynamically alters the font based on current typing behaviour. Results show that with these fonts users can distinguish basic contexts as well as individuals. They also explicitly control font influences for personal communication with creative effects. This thesis further contributes concepts and implemented tools for collecting touch behaviour data, analysing and modelling touch behaviour, and creating behaviour-aware and adaptive mobile touch interfaces. Together, these contributions support researchers and developers in investigating and building such user interfaces. Overall, this research shows how variability in mobile touch behaviour can be addressed and exploited for the benefit of the users. The thesis further discusses opportunities for transfer and reuse of touch behaviour models and information across applications and devices, for example to address tradeoffs of privacy/security and usability. Finally, the work concludes by reflecting on the general role of behaviour-aware user interfaces, proposing to view them as a way of embedding expectations about user input into interactive artefacts

    How Unique do we Move? : Understanding the Human Body and Context Factors for User Identification

    Get PDF
    Past work showed great promise in biometric user identification and authentication through exploiting specific features of specific body parts. We investigate human motion across the whole body, to explore what parts of the body exhibit more unique movement patterns, and are more suitable to identify users in general. We collect and analyze full-body motion data across various activities (e.g., sitting, standing), handheld objects (uni- or bimanual), and tasks (e.g., watching TV or walking). Our analysis shows, e.g., that gait as a strong feature amplifies when carrying items, game activity elicits more unique behaviors than texting on a smartphone, and motion features are robust across body parts whereas posture features are more robust across tasks. Our work provides a holistic reference on how context affects human motion to identify us across a variety of factors, useful to inform researchers and practitioners of behavioral biometric systems on a large scale

    Seamless Authentication for Ubiquitous Devices

    Get PDF
    User authentication is an integral part of our lives; we authenticate ourselves to personal computers and a variety of other things several times a day. Authentication is burdensome. When we wish to access to a computer or a resource, it is an additional task that we need to perform~-- an interruption in our workflow. In this dissertation, we study people\u27s authentication behavior and attempt to make authentication to desktops and smartphones less burdensome for users. First, we present the findings of a user study we conducted to understand people\u27s authentication behavior: things they authenticate to, how and when they authenticate, authentication errors they encounter and why, and their opinions about authentication. In our study, participants performed about 39 authentications per day on average; the majority of these authentications were to personal computers (desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet) and with passwords, but the number of authentications to other things (e.g., car, door) was not insignificant. We saw a high failure rate for desktop and laptop authentication among our participants, affirming the need for a more usable authentication method. Overall, we found that authentication was a noticeable part of all our participants\u27 lives and burdensome for many participants, but they accepted it as cost of security, devising their own ways to cope with it. Second, we propose a new approach to authentication, called bilateral authentication, that leverages wrist-wearable technology to enable seamless authentication for things that people use with their hands, while wearing a smart wristband. In bilateral authentication two entities (e.g., user\u27s wristband and the user\u27s phone) share their knowledge (e.g., about user\u27s interaction with the phone) to verify the user\u27s identity. Using this approach, we developed a seamless authentication method for desktops and smartphones. Our authentication method offers quick and effortless authentication, continuous user verification while the desktop (or smartphone) is in use, and automatic deauthentication after use. We evaluated our authentication method through four in-lab user studies, evaluating the method\u27s usability and security from the system and the user\u27s perspective. Based on the evaluation, our authentication method shows promise for reducing users\u27 authentication burden for desktops and smartphones

    How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research? (Extended Version)

    Full text link
    In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. This WEIRD skew may hinder understanding of diverse populations and their cultural differences. The usable privacy and security (UPS) field has inherited many research methodologies from research on human factor fields. We conducted a literature review to understand the extent to which participant samples in UPS papers were from WEIRD countries and the characteristics of the methodologies and research topics in each user study recruiting Western or non-Western participants. We found that the skew toward WEIRD countries in UPS is greater than that in HCI. Geographic and linguistic barriers in the study methods and recruitment methods may cause researchers to conduct user studies locally. In addition, many papers did not report participant demographics, which could hinder the replication of the reported studies, leading to low reproducibility. To improve geographic diversity, we provide the suggestions including facilitate replication studies, address geographic and linguistic issues of study/recruitment methods, and facilitate research on the topics for non-WEIRD populations.Comment: This paper is the extended version of the paper presented at USENIX SECURITY 202

    The usability of knowledge based authentication methods on mobile devices

    Get PDF
    Mobile devices are providing ever increasing functionality to users, and the risks associated with applications storing personal details are high. Graphical authentication methods have been shown to provide better security in terms of password space than traditional approaches, as well as being more memorable. The usability of any system is important since an unusable system will often be avoided. This thesis aims to investigate graphical authentication methods based on recall, cued recall and recognition memory in terms of their usability and security

    Metafore mobilnih komunikacija ; Метафоры мобильной связи.

    Get PDF
    Mobilne komunikacije su polje informacione i komunikacione tehnologije koje karakteriše brzi razvoj i u kome se istraživanjem u analitičkim okvirima kognitivne lingvistike, zasnovanom na uzorku od 1005 odrednica, otkriva izrazito prisustvo metafore, metonimije, analogije i pojmovnog objedinjavanja. Analiza uzorka reči i izraza iz oblasti mobilnih medija, mobilnih operativnih sistema, dizajna korisničkih interfejsa, terminologije mobilnih mreža, kao i slenga i tekstizama koje upotrebljavaju korisnici mobilnih naprava ukazuje da pomenuti kognitivni mehanizmi imaju ključnu ulogu u olakšavanju interakcije između ljudi i širokog spektra mobilnih uređaja sa računarskim sposobnostima, od prenosivih računara i ličnih digitalnih asistenata (PDA), do mobilnih telefona, tableta i sprava koje se nose na telu. Ti mehanizmi predstavljaju temelj razumevanja i nalaze se u osnovi principa funkcionisanja grafičkih korisničkih interfejsa i direktne manipulacije u računarskim okruženjima. Takođe je analiziran i poseban uzorak od 660 emotikona i emođija koji pokazuju potencijal za proširenje značenja, imajući u vidu značaj piktograma za tekstualnu komunikaciju u vidu SMS poruka i razmenu tekstualnih sadržaja na društvenim mrežama kojima se redovno pristupa putem mobilnih uređaja...Mobile communications are a fast-developing field of information and communication technology whose exploration within the analytical framework of cognitive linguistics, based on a sample of 1005 entries, reveals the pervasive presence of metaphor, metonymy analogy and conceptual integration. The analysis of the sample consisting of words and phrases related to mobile media, mobile operating systems and interface design, the terminology of mobile networking, as well as the slang and textisms employed by mobile gadget users shows that the above cognitive mechanisms play a key role in facilitating interaction between people and a wide range of mobile computing devices from laptops and PDAs to mobile phones, tablets and wearables. They are the cornerstones of comprehension that are behind the principles of functioning of graphical user interfaces and direct manipulation in computing environments. A separate sample, featuring a selection of 660 emoticons and emoji, exhibiting the potential for semantic expansion was also analyzed, in view of the significance of pictograms for text-based communication in the form of text messages or exchanges on social media sites regularly accessed via mobile devices..

    Designing Usable and Secure Authentication Mechanisms for Public Spaces

    Get PDF
    Usable and secure authentication is a research field that approaches different challenges related to authentication, including security, from a human-computer interaction perspective. That is, work in this field tries to overcome security, memorability and performance problems that are related to the interaction with an authentication mechanism. More and more services that require authentication, like ticket vending machines or automated teller machines (ATMs), take place in a public setting, in which security threats are more inherent than in other settings. In this work, we approach the problem of usable and secure authentication for public spaces. The key result of the work reported here is a set of well-founded criteria for the systematic evaluation of authentication mechanisms. These criteria are justified by two different types of investigation, which are on the one hand prototypical examples of authentication mechanisms with improved usability and security, and on the other hand empirical studies of security-related behavior in public spaces. So this work can be structured in three steps: Firstly, we present five authentication mechanisms that were designed to overcome the main weaknesses of related work which we identified using a newly created categorization of authentication mechanisms for public spaces. The systems were evaluated in detail and showed encouraging results for future use. This and the negative sides and problems that we encountered with these systems helped us to gain diverse insights on the design and evaluation process of such systems in general. It showed that the development process of authentication mechanisms for public spaces needs to be improved to create better results. Along with this, it provided insights on why related work is difficult to compare to each other. Keeping this in mind, first criteria were identified that can fill these holes and improve design and evaluation of authentication mechanisms, with a focus on the public setting. Furthermore, a series of work was performed to gain insights on factors influencing the quality of authentication mechanisms and to define a catalog of criteria that can be used to support creating such systems. It includes a long-term study of different PIN-entry systems as well as two field studies and field interviews on real world ATM-use. With this, we could refine the previous criteria and define additional criteria, many of them related to human factors. For instance, we showed that social issues, like trust, can highly affect the security of an authentication mechanism. We used these results to define a catalog of seven criteria. Besides their definition, we provide information on how applying them influences the design, implementation and evaluation of a the development process, and more specifically, how adherence improves authentication in general. A comparison of two authentication mechanisms for public spaces shows that a system that fulfills the criteria outperforms a system with less compliance. We could also show that compliance not only improves the authentication mechanisms themselves, it also allows for detailed comparisons between different systems

    A Framework to Enhance Privacy-Awareness in Mobile Web Systems

    Get PDF
    In the last decade, the use of online social network sites has dramatically increased and these sites have succeeded in attracting a large number of users. The social network site has become a daily tool people use to find out about the latest news and to share details of their personal information. Many people use Internet mobile devices to browse these sites. The widespread use of some technologies unnecessarily puts the privacy of users at risk, even when these users remain anonymous. This study examines the risks to privacy surrounding the misuse of users' personal information, such as maintaining trustworthy sites, as well as privacy issues associated with sharing personal information with others. This study also develops a framework to enhance privacy awareness in mobile Web systems. A privacy framework is proposed that incorporates suitability in the design and flexibility in the use to suit different types of Web mobile devices, and provides simple ways of adjusting and creating different privacy policies. This framework allows the user to create different levels of privacy settings and to better manage the exchange of personal information with other sites. The proposed conceptual model for this study is derived from a review of the literature and the current privacy models. It shows how online users are able to create different privacy policies and set different policies to access the data. It also explains how the centrality of personal information details in one server will limit the distribution of personal information over the Internet and will provide users with more authority to control the sharing of their information with other websites. The design of the proposed framework is derived from developing other privacy models and adding new ideas that enhance the security level of protecting the privacy of users' information. The study consists of five main tasks that include two different qualitative methodologies, programming two applications and testing the framework

    DigiPal: Cross-Cultural & Interlingual Mobile Interaction for Children

    Get PDF
    This thesis contributes research and analysis towards, and the design and development of, a Digital Pen pal application (DigiPal) for children from two different countries and languages. Children from a developed and a developing country came together and participated in multiple studies for the design of the app with their ideas and input both matching and differing. Feedback and thoughts provided by them contributed to the design of the app and towards a generalised model for similar applications. DigiPal required a translation system to be integrated into the App so that the children could talk in their own language which not only makes sure they can talk confidently, but also contributes to preserve local languages. Google translate was the option which was used in this case following a study that assured its effectiveness. Accuracy was relatively low but higher levels of Understandability gave some hope to advocate the possibility of use of Google translate as a translator and most importantly as a facilitator of cross-cultural chat. A real time letter exchange activity, with children from Nepal and England was conducted. In a deep analysis of text entry errors and their impact on translation, and on other translation errors and their possible causes, findings show why and where Google translate struggled. However, children’s reaction to the translated letters, as well as analysis that shows how improving text entry correctness can support the translation software, shows that regardless of some error children could communicate and they enjoyed the activity overall. This work also contributes insights for design that are needed beyond translation to create an engaging and culturally level experience. Two separate studies were conducted to gather some culturally influenced attributes from the children. In one, children drew pictures to introduce themselves whereas in the second one they drew pictures of games they would like to have in an application like DigiPal. The thesis concludes with a generalisable model that can be used by other app developers to consider how to create culturally level products for children from different countries and with different languages
    corecore