The behavioural impact of a visually represented virtual assistant in a selfservice checkout context

Our research investigated whether the presence of an interface agent - or virtual assistant (VA) - in a self-service checkout context has behavioural effects on the transaction process during particular tasks. While many participants claimed to have not noticed a VA within the self-service interface, behaviour was still affected, i.e. fewer people made errors with the VA present than in the voice-only and control conditions. The results are explained as reflective of an unconscious observation of non-verbal cues exhibited by the VA. The results are discussed in relation to possible behavioural outcomes of VA presence.</p

Virtual assistants and social cues:retail interactions and consumer experience

This paper describes a multi-disciplinary approach toinforming the design of a Virtual Assistant (VA) for use ina self-service checkout (SSCO). SSCO transactions requirehigh levels of attention as people attempt to performmultiple tasks in the shortest possible time. This is ofteneffortful, affecting performance and satisfaction. One proposed solution is a VA to help guide users’ attention torelevant areas. This paper discusses three key positiveoutcomes to cueing attention with a VA. It also highlightsthe advantage of adopting a multi-disciplinary perspectiveto providing solutions to business problems in a modernretail context

Bootstrapping adoption of the Pico password replacement system

In previous work we presented Pico, an authentication sys- tem designed to be both more usable and more secure than passwords. One unsolved problem was that Pico, in its quest to explore the whole solution space without being bound by compatibility shackles, requires changes at both the prover and the verifier, which makes it hard to convince anyone to adopt it: users won’t buy an authentication gadget that doesn’t let them log into anything and service providers won’t sup- port a system that no users are equipped to log in with. In this paper we present three measures to break this vicious circle, starting with the “Pico Lens” browser add-on that rewrites websites on the fly so that they appear Pico-enabled. Our add-on offers the user most (though not all) of the usability and security benefits of Pico, thus fostering adoption from users even before service providers are on board. This will enable Pico to build up a user base. We also developed a server-side Wordpress plugin which can serve both as a reference example and as a useful enabler in its own right (as Wordpress is one of the leading content management platforms on the web). Finally, we developed a software version of the Pico client running on a smartphone, the Pico App, so that people can try out Pico (at the price of slightly reduced security) without having to acquire and carry another gadget. Having broken the vicious circle we’ll be in a stronger position to persuade providers to offer support for Pico in parallel with passwords.ERC 30722

Responsibility and Tangible Security: Towards a Theory of User Acceptance of Security Tokens

This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by the Internet Society.Security and usability issues with passwords suggest a need for a new authentication scheme. Several alternatives involve a physical device or token. We investigate one such alternative, Pico: an authentication scheme that utilizes multiple wearable devices. We present the grounded theory results of a series of semi-structured interviews for exploring perceptions of this scheme. We found that the idea of carrying physical devices increases perceived personal responsibility for secure authentication, making the risks and inconvenience associated with loss and theft salient for participants. Although our work is focused on Pico, the results of the study contribute to a broader understanding of user perception and concerns of responsibility for any token-based authentication schemes.We are grateful to the European Research Council for funding this research through grant StG 307224 (Pico)

To have and have not

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final published version is available at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2641705&CFID=518729474&CFTOKEN=85977065.We address the problem of locking and unlocking a device, such as a laptop, a phone or a security token, based on the absence or presence of the user. We detect user presence by sensing the proximity of a subset of their possessions, making the process automatic and effortless. As in previous work, a master key unlocks the device and a secret-sharing scheme allows us to reconstruct this master key in the presence of k-out-of-n items. We extend this basic scheme in various directions, e.g. by allowing items to issue a dynamically variable number of shares based on how confident they are that the user is present. The position we argue in this paper is that a multi-dimensional approach to authentication that fuses several contextual inputs, similar to that already adopted by major web sites, can also bring advantages at the local scale