[ux] Tor Configuration Dialogue User Study Update

[Linda Naeun Lee]

Hello:

My name is Linda Lee, a cs security researcher at Berkeley looking to make
Tor more usable for censorship circumvention. My colleagues (David Fifield,
Nathan Malkin, Ganesh Iyer) are looking at the configuration interface with
regarding bridges and proxies.

We hope to be working with you and to make positive changes to the
interface. So far, we've run intensive, one-on-one qualitative studies
consisting of putting people in a chosen censored environment (a censor
which blocks just websites, a censor which blocks websites and public tor
relays, and a censor which blocks websites, public tor relays, and
hardcoded bridge relays) to see if they could connect successfully.

We found that people can't connect to Tor because:

1. people don't know how the internet works, so they don't know how
censorship works. People know that they are being censored, but it's hard
for them to distinguish between censored websites and censored internet
connections; most people who didn't need bridges felt compelled to set one
up because they were being censored (we censored websites, but not their
connection), and got stuck.
2. the interface guides people down unideal paths. Since the proxy decision
is the last window they see before they connect, a failed connection
attempt usually results in people trying to configure a proxy but failing
(our most common failure case). There were multiple people who took over 20
minutes trying to configure proxies, and we had to cut them off.
3. increased support for failure cases would be helpful. (giving people
ideas about how long to wait for bootstrapping, instructions on what to try
next if their connection fails, such as picking different bridges rather
than setting up a proxy, ..etc.)

Based on these main observations, we worked to create a clickable prototype
shown here:   https://marvelapp.com/9620ef

-incorporating point1: a roadmap of configuration while they configure
bridges and proxies, breakpoints in the progress bar in the connection
screen
-incorporating point2: giving "retry" and "reconfigure" options, and
redirecting people to bridges, the beginning of the configuration, if they
click "reconfigure"
-incorporating point3: the connection window will give helpful hints on
what to do next, give time estimates, and show what bridges and proxy was
used to connect on the failed attempt.

We plan to run a large scale test to see if these changes will beneficial.

If you want to see details of the experiment, we have video recordings of
each session participant, summaries of the video recordings, transcribed
interviews conducted, and much more here:
https://github.com/lindanlee/circumvention-ux-tor/tree/master/sessions/pre.
Feel free to contact me with any questions or clarifications.

Cheers,

-- 
Linda Naeun Lee
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