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