[ux] A review of the user interface of four censorship-circumvention tools

[David Fifield]

Cecile Basnage and I ran four censorship circumvention tools and
recorded our first impressions of their user interface. We tried
Psiphon, Lantern, Ultrasurf, and Freegate. The report and many
screenshots is here:

https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/circ-tool-ux-2016/

Note that this isn't a comprehensive review, just our impressions as
first-time users. We used a Windows 7 VM with IE configured as the
default browser. We did this survey to get ideas for the ongoing Tor
Launcher UX improvement project:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorLauncherUX2016

All of these tools work by changing the system-wide proxy setting. They
may also have a VPN mode but we didn't try that. Psiphon and Lantern
start running immediately, without configuration. Ultrasurf and Freegate
have a preliminary configuration dialog, like Tor Browser. During the
test we were confused about what destinations Lantern was proxying and
which it was not; since then we learned that Lantern does some kind of
dynamic detection of blocking, so unblocked sites don't go through
Lantern. Freegate sometimes showed us a block page saying that it's only
intended for users in China; but it didn't happen every time. All these
tools are *much* smaller downloads than Tor Browser, between 2 and 5 MB.