Hi,

In the last three years, Community and UX teams have been working together to collect user feedback and integrate it into our products while preserving Tor users' privacy. In this email, we're going to explain the present, how it works, and our next phase.

## 1. User Advocate

Since 2018, the Community team works with an intern from Outreachy[0] as a User Advocate. You can read more about this project here: "Help us support our users"[1]. Every month, the User Advocate submits to the tor-project mailing list an User Feedback Report with questions and comments from our Frontdesk system and other sources (Reddit, Tor stack exchange, Google Play, blog comments, IRC #tor, etc.).

If you were around at that time, maybe you remember Pari presented an user feedback research[2] at the Tor Dev Meeting in Rome, in 2018. You can read our previous user feedback reports here: Cybelle (2018)[3], Wayward (2019)[4], and Cleopatra (2020)[5]. As Nicolei started last month, on May 19th, he sent his first user feedback report[6]. Nicolei's internship will end in August this year. And Outreachy will open a new selection process in September/October.

After the report is sent, we discuss the issues and comments at UX and/or Community team meetings on IRC (#tor-meeting). For some of these issues, we open new tickets in Gitlab, our new bug tracker, and the user advocate adds comments to open issues. For example, we have some tickets to improve the website, Tor Browser and other products. We have plans to introduce a global label [user-feedback] to make explicit which issue came directly from users.

There's also a proposal to use Discourse, but so far, we only discussed it a few times during the Gitlab process and at the last all hands, and mostly to improve our blog moderation and user feedback.

## 2. User Research: UX feedback and Tor training in the Global South

As part of sponsor work, the Community and UX teams have met users face to face during our digital security training in the Global South. We wrote about it and also added some metrics of this project in a blog post[7], "Reaching people where they are." The user research reports are publicly available here[8], and the users we've met during this project informed the work we did to outline User Personas. Personas were made not to frame our work to any target, but instead to reach a common understanding across teams of "Who are Tor users?" and who we are designing for. We also did a session about Users Personas[9] in Stockholm Dev Meeting (2019). We sent a more detailed narrative report regarding the activities to all Tor core contributors in January (2020), where outlines each activity we ran carefully in all the countries we visited.

The new Community portal reflects the first step in understanding the different roles we host in our community. The intent is to serve as a home for non-savvy technical people but also technical people as relay operators or onion sites admins to collaborate with Tor. Furthermore, we made public and gave open access to the material at the training section in the Community portal, where we collected and organized the materials that we have used during our travels and meetings with groups. All this content was co-designed with our community based on their needs.

The most significant difference from Frontdesk, where users come to us to report issues, this program works with our team members to reach out and go to communities to run usability tests and interviews with users. Both ways of collecting user feedback complement each other. We not just collect feedback but also teach about digital security holistically, to encourage critical users to make decisions by themselves. Threat modelling exercises to understand digital security assets have been run with communities in the Global South.

The point about the whole program it's not just a way to collect software feedback. Part of our non-profit work is to educate users about privacy, anonymity and technology as a way to promote and advance human rights. We developed a program focused on building a network of human rights defenders, journalists, whistleblower platforms, digital security trainers, hackerspaces, activists, marginalized communities, and having a stable relationship with them, the people who trust and most need our software.

In the last year, we built partnerships in our first Training Program, where NGOs and other organizations in the Global South were running Tor training and UX tests by themselves. We had training in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uganda, Indonesia, and Tanzania. We developed a process of continuous improvement for these organizations to collect feedback from their assistants about our products and the decision they just ran[10].

## 3. Next steps

The next phase of this sponsor will happen from July 2019 - 2020, where we will focus on supporting our partner organizations during this Covid-19 pandemic, the migration to secure spaces for running their activities online and also the spread of remote user research made by them and for us on our recently released improvements in Tor Browser for desktop and Android, and the entire Tor Project new portals.

In July, Narrira Lemos will be back to work with us as a fellow from Bertha Institute. The work Nah will be running will be focused on mobiles and per se Tor Browser for Android. She also will give support (as she did in 2019) on coordinating user research with communities.

Antonela and Gus UX and Community Team

## Notes

[0] Outreachy https://www.outreachy.org/ [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/Outreachy#TheProjects [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/wikis/org/meetings/2018Rome/Note... [3] Jun 2018 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-June/001829.html Jul 2018 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-July/001871.html Aug 2018 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-August/001940.html [4] Oct 2018 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-November/002058.html Nov 2018 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-December/002125.html Dec 2018 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-January/002176.html Jan 2019 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-February/002230.html Feb 2019 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-March/002259.html Mar 2019 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-May/002311.html Apr 2019 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-May/002333.html [5] Dec 2019 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-January/002645.html Jan 2020 User Feedback Report - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-February/002688.html [6] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-June/002887.html [7] https://blog.torproject.org/reaching-people-where-they-are [8] https://community.torproject.org/user-research/ [9] https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/wikis/org/meetings/2019Stockholm... [10] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/research/-/tree/master/community https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-May/002850.html