I spent the past week in Sweden, attending the Stockholm Internet Forum, http://www.stockholminternetforum.se/, for part of it. I made a number of tails 0.10.2 usb sticks for people on request. I also asked a lot of people their impressions of Tor and Tails. I received a plethora of feedback. All 8 people are involved in the Internet Freedom policy, technology, or freedom of speech communities. They had very different levels of self-assessed technical skill. The 8 people represented 6 countries.
Very interesting user study (of sorts)! If you were to guage each of the user's level of familiarity with Tor conceptually from 1 (never heard of it) to 5 (I use Tor often!), where would these 8 people fit?
I'm also curious how much explaining of Tails or Tor conceptually you did before the users started to interact with the system.
# Sixth issue: no flash, no warning
2 of 8 people had flash apps on their website. 4 of 8 had ad banners that used flash. All were surprised at the red outline with a snake in it appearing instead of their flash apps. None understood what happened.
After an explanation, one person suggested changing the red outline with snake to an actual message written inside, along the lines of 'this app blocked for your protection. click here to unblock it.' I explained why that wouldn't work (because there is no flash, java, silverlight plugins installed) and their answer was 'then do not show it at all'. Inside noscript, I unchecked the 'show placeholder..' option and had them browse again. they were happy. It seems if the user cannot do anything about the blocked apps, not showing them may be preferred.
This is a tricky usability minefield in my opinion, it's a really hard line to navigate between hiding something from a user they probably won't miss (ads) and hiding something from a user that would confuse the hell out of them (site flash intro .swf).
All that said, I might have to replicate your experiment and see what I can come up with :)
- warms0x --- xmpp: warms0x@riseup.net http: http://warms0x.github.com