[ux] Tor Configuration Dialogue User Study Update

[Mark Smith]

On 12/1/15 2:38 PM, Linda Naeun Lee wrote:
> Spencer:
>
> Thank you for the insightful comments! It is helpful to have someone who
> has worked on this to give us feedback on the work that we are doing.
>
> The point you made about "connect directly" was a concern we have yet to
> address in the prototype. Some of our participants thought that the
> connect button (in the old interface) always used a vanilla Tor
> connection, which wasn't true. Some of our participants did not know how
> they successfully connected to Tor because of this confusion.

For the record, Kathy Brade and myself (the primary developers of Tor 
Launcher) consider this behavior to be a bug and we are planning to fix 
it. Specifically, if someone clicks "Connect", then we plan to discard 
any non-default bridge and proxy settings (we will prompt before doing 
so when appropriate).

We are also considering making some simple changes to the configuration 
flow based on the recent user tests. For example, rather than leaving 
people at the proxy panel after a connection failure, we plan to display 
an error panel that includes a "Reconfigure" button. Clicking that 
button will return users to the first panel (bridges Yes/No) so that 
they can step through and review all of their configuration choices.

We are also looking at adding some text to the bridges configuration 
panel to give users a hint that if the bridge they choose does not work 
then it may help to try another type of bridge. They will still need to 
guess, but they will at least know that trying another guess might be 
productive. We've always wanted to have more explanatory text on this 
panel but choosing good wording is difficult.

But -- before we redesign the configuration wizard we plan to wait for 
the results from the next round of testing that Linda and others are 
preparing for (and Kathy and I are happy to review prototypes, discuss 
ideas, etc. during the experiment design phase).

-- 
Mark Smith
Pearl Crescent
http://pearlcrescent.com/