If you’re creating technology in 2025, take a hint from the feature wish lists of activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. Here’s our 2025 guide to what you should consider including in every tech tool and why.
Superbloom is delighted to launch its report, resources, documentation and open source artworks focussing on the Design for internet shutdowns OSS technology workshops at COSCUP 2023. This report has insights into how designers practice in OSS, how Taiwanese and South East Asian citizens view critical internet shutdowns and censorship circumvention topics and a framework for running similar workshops for OSS anywhere in the world.
How do you know that a product respects your privacy – other than by wading through the fine print? We’ve created a framework to measure the way people actually experience privacy in tech products.
Superbloom is excited to share a communications toolkit designed for small tech and activist organizations, developed in collaboration with the Open Technology Fund’s Learning Lab. Recognizing the resource challenges nonprofits face, these tools are meant to help improve branding and outreach, ensuring your work gets noticed and understood in a crowded digital space.
They have an idea. They have programming skills. And now they have 182 days to create a prototype. This is the Prototype Fund, a German government program to support open-source projects. Superbloom has been providing support for the teams on “everything but code” since 2018 – from UX design to fundraising and everything in between. This blog post is for Prototype Fund teams, and really, it’s for anyone hoping to do a lot on a development project in a short time. Here’s how you make the most of 182 days!
In 2024 we returned to COSCUP to hold another workshop focussed on designers making a contribution to an OSS project: “Designers in Tech-Open Source Design Workshop”.
A Tech Policy Design Playbook was developed and published as the culmination of our work with the World Wide Web Foundation and 3x3 on Deceptive Design, and includes guidance on how to run community co-design engagements around tech policy design. Superbloom, in partnership with Dr Carolina Are, facilitated three community sessions around the risks to “high risk” content creators and being de-platformed from essential social and content platforms.
In December 2022, Superbloom partnered with Internews and Okthanks to create resources that help open source software (OSS) teams better understand how design processes and user-centered activities improve usability, and therefore the security of open source tools. After publishing these resources and speaking about them to the wider OSS community, we found that designers and developers working in privacy and security OSS tool teams wanted to explore specific challenges through conversations with us. This led to the final component of the Adoptable project in the form of coaching.
How do you find out if the software you are building is usable and useful for others? We’ve written this blog post about how to address this challenge! It is often easiest to try out the software when it’s been fully built, but this is also when any mistakes are most difficult to fix because so much has already been coded. This is a concern and a challenge for product managers, developers and UX designers alike.
Superbloom’s mission is to change who technology serves. We leverage fiscal sponsorship as a tool to support the growth and maturity of the digital rights and Internet Freedom communities, with a focus on human-centered research and design. Looking …
We worked with developer and designer Gina Giampaolo to refresh the Code for Science & Society website in 2022. We caught up with Gina to reflect on the project and talk about design in civic tech.
The dream of the ‘90s is over. We now have an Internet of Things thriving in physical space where our bodies live instead of a Cyberspace envisioned as a realm solely of the mind. That's cause for optimism as we consider how resilient organizations can collaboratively build a different future in this, our physical reality.
In September 2023, we were able to participate in Feira, the Global Gathering, a festival for digital rights defenders, convened by Team Community. The Feira was a three day social and networking festival hosted in Estoril, Portugal on September 15 - 17, 2023. The event, designed, modeled and named for the concept of a community market, was created to provide digital rights defenders with a space to connect with others in the digital rights community for informal meetups, discussions, and joy — particularly as this was the first time gathering in-person for most participants since before the start of the COVID19 pandemic.
Introducing our new report “From Policy to Pixels: Strategic UX Design and User Support for GDPR Implementation.” Supported by the University of California Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), we conducted research to better understand how GDPR policy implementation is situated in current UX practices and how multi-disciplinary product teams reach design decisions
Over the last six months, we’ve been updating our Usable Security Audit Methodology to better reflect our current practices, the advances in our fields of interest, and accessibility as a core principle. Through an inventory of our tools and practices, surveying the field to find similar work we admire, and workshops with close collaborators and community members, we revamped our approach, which we’re now calling our User Experience Toolbox for Risk Mitigation and Accessibility.
At COSCUP 2023, we held a workshop "The Design We Open - Network Disruption Hackathon" (The Design We Open Workshop - 網路中斷黑客松), a workshop focused on how we, as designers and configurers of technology for human rights needs can better understand Taiwanese citizens' understanding and experiences of internet shutdowns, and what is important in a partial or full internet shutdown.
Being a designer in Open Source (OS) isn’t always easy or straightforward, neither is it the same for all designers. Different open source projects are set up differently, hence demand different outputs and engagements from designers. In this blog, we list the six main tenets for a successful design contribution to OS projects.
A summary of diary studies from designers who contribute to Open Source Software The aim of this short research project was to investigate some of the key questions relating to design in OSS and fill some of the larger systemic “gaps” of information …
At DWeb Camp 2023, we organized the event's first Design Track. This is a reflection on the valuable lessons we learned and our ongoing dedication to making the decentralized web more user-friendly, inclusive, and socially conscious in our future endeavors.
The Feira @ the Global Gathering is a three day social and networking festival for digital rights defenders, hosted in an outdoor space in Estoril, Portugal on September 15, 16 and 17, 2023. Join Jamie Tomasello and Eriol Fox from the Superbloom team, Matt Stempeck from Civic Tech Field Guide and Caroline Sinders from Convocation there!
With support from the Open Technology Fund Secure Usability and Accessibility Lab, UX Designers, User Researchers, Digital Security Trainers and OSS tool builders gathered at RightsCon 2023 for the Human Rights Centered Design convening. We held critical discussions about the challenges and opportunities that sharing user insights could bring to how OSS tools for human rights needs are built in ways that are more context sensitive and specific, and share these insights here
Usable Software Ecosystem Research (USER) is a Sloan Foundation-supported research initiative that explores how open source scientific and research software (SROSS) teams understand, consider, and undertake usability and design opportunities in their projects. To read more about this project please check out Blog #1, Blog #2, our project website, and open repo.
We welcomed Jasmine McNealy to our Board of Directors in 2022. Jasmine brings extensive expertise in privacy, information, communications, technology, law, and policy to our Board. We interviewed Jasmine to learn more about her, her career path, why she serves on our board, and what our mission means to her. Be sure to check out our upcoming interviews with Board members Jackie Lu and Scout Brody, as well.
In partnership with the World Wide Web Foundation and 3x3, we are pleased to launch the results of the Deceptive Design Tech Policy Design Lab - the culmination of a series of workshops with 117 stakeholders from 31 countries - five opportunities for changing the status quo and moving towards trusted design patterns.
The world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age is back. After three years online, the 12th edition of RightsCon is both live in San José, Costa Rica, and online via the RightsCon platform from Monday, June 5 to Thursday, June 8 2023. Will you join us there?
In 2022, Superbloom partnered with Internews and Okthanks to create resources that help open OSS teams understand how design processes and activities improve the usability of open source tools. This post outlines some key themes identifying challenges in OSS design adoption, and introduces the resources created in response to these challenges.
Part two in a series of three blogs. Here we outline part of our research process for the Usable Software Ecosystems Research project. USER is a Sloan Foundation supported research initiative that explores how open source scientific and research software teams understand, consider, and undertake usability and design opportunities in their projects.
In March 2023, Superbloom attended FOSS Backstage conference in Berlin with support from Open Technology Fund. In this blog, we reflect on a design workshop we hosted for non-designers, “Making Design More Open” and share our key learnings and takeaways.
Superbloom will be hosting five sessions at the Mozilla Festival (Monday, March 20 - Friday, March 24 2023). If you’ll be there, we’d love to see you, meet you and get to know you. Come join us! Want to learn how to design a Tech Policy playbook? Are you interested in global tech transparency? Would you like to find out how shadow data affects you? Do you want to understand design’s impact on encrypted messaging? Are you looking for how to center human rights in usability? Join us and 1000s of others at MozFest 2023! This year’s event will be held in person in Amsterdam and online and the Superbloom team will be participating in five of the 360+ sessions. Intrigued? Read more in our post.
In October 2022, Open Technology Fund (OTF) brought together a group of around 50 technologists, researchers, usability experts, and digital security practitioners working on internet shutdowns. Together, the group engaged in many topics, ranging from understanding the lived experience of an internet shutdown to the challenges around technology interventions, and measuring and monitoring networks during a shutdown. An internet shutdown is when access to the internet is restricted, such that people are unable to use the internet or internet based services. This is an information control tactic that is increasingly being used around the world to affect the free flow of information. Our learnings from this session are outlined in this blog post.
Supported by the Sloan Foundation, we introduce USER, a research initiative that explores how open source scientific and research software teams understand, consider, and undertake usability and design opportunities in their projects. As part of our active work on this project, we are openly sharing our progress along the way in a series of blog posts.
2022 was a year full of shifts, adaptations and evolutions for so many in our community. For us, we launched a new identity, welcomed four new team members and three new fiscally sponsored projects, and partnered with many new organizations and funders. And, for many on our team, this year presented several opportunities to meet for the first time in person. These markers of growth and evolution could not have happened without the continued support from our community.
Since 2020, we've been working with our community to rebrand Simply Secure. This post explores how we collaboratively built our new identity as Superbloom.
Supported by the Open Technology Fund, our team provided human-centered design and research support for Mobile Surveillance Monitor, a new, public online platform that tracks and maps mobile surveillance threats.
We created Building Blocks to provide actionable resources for existing and potential funders to better support digital infrastructure projects and communities of practice.
Would you like to hear how the move from deceptive design to trusted patterns is critical to our shared future? Would you like to learn more about how to make encrypted apps more inclusive and accessible? Do you need on the spot design and UX aid and advice to improve your tools? Simply Secure team members will be joining six sessions during Rightscon 2022: June 6-10. We’d love to see you, learn about your work, and collaborate. Come join us! .
In 2021, Simply Secure partnered with Stefanie Mühlbacher to support the arso development collective on their Sonar project. We interviewed Stefanie to share her experiences and advice for working with technical project teams.
Published in partnership with Popular Science, these Alternate Data Realities are a three-story series, exploring near future scenarios in which “we the people” benefit from our own data.
Every day tech platforms confront us with information about how our data is used, and pop-ups with language like this website uses cookies, accept and continue are an accepted part of the online experience. Consenting to sharing data is so strongly encouraged by the platforms that “opting in” or “opting out” is not the right framework because coerced consent cannot be meaningful. However, new privacy regulations such as the forthcoming Digital Service Act from the European Union and California’s Consumer Privacy Act are initial attempts to empower individuals to give meaningful consent to data collection.
This fall, we had the pleasure of working with Digital Democracy on their application, Mapeo. Mapeo is a mobile and desktop app that enables indigenous communities to map their lands, sites, and resources, as well as record and monitor environmental and legal abuses by corporations and the state. The app is used by communities around the world, and due to the sensitive nature of the data being recorded, contributing to Mapeo can be high-risk for users. Our design challenge focused on user safety: how to protect end users in the likely event that a community mapper’s phone is lost, seized, damaged, or stolen.
Are you stuck on how to build or communicate a feature? Not sure how to get user feedback? Want to learn more about how the consent user experience has changed? Are you eager to find out how to navigate design choices while prioritizing human rights? Is digital infrastructure funding a topic you are keen to hear more about? Want to dive deep into data colonialism? We have some answers.
Mailvelope is a browser extension that makes it easy to use PGP encryption, whether you use Gmail, Outlook, or many other email providers. With the support of UXFund, Simply Secure worked with Mailvelope to support users who want to use an organization-wide PGP key to send an encrypted email. Kelsey Smith and Thomas Oberndörfer had a conversation in 2022, reflecting on the technical problem and the design process.
In 2021, Simply Secure challenged the status quo, brought a DEI lens to our our work with partners, explored opportunities for strategic programmative, evaluative, and design interventions in infrastructure, solidified partnerships to support global projects in design and usability, built and shared open resources, and actively engaged with our growing community.
How are hallway conversations and academic conferences recreated in the digital sphere? Convocation Research + Design and Simply Secure answer this question with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in the new report...
FileZilla is a popular open-source file transfer protocol (FTP) certificates with explanation and reassurance. Here we share how we tackled a FileZilla Server team to complete user research and provide design recommendations toward the goal of guiding users on how to set up TLS technical challenge as designers through strategic knowledge gathering.
We interviewed Matthew Wild, the creator of Snikket—a safe and secure instant messaging app—to learn more about his work process and experience working with Simply Secure to improve Snikket’s usability with support from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) Usability Lab.
Through the OTF Usability Lab, we were fortunate enough to work with Digital Democracy (Dd) on their application, Mapeo – a mobile app that enables indigenous communities across the world to document and map all kinds of useful data. We interviewed Dd’s Lead UX Designer, Sabella Flagg, to learn more about her journey to non-profit design work.
We helped website security service Deflect appeal to a larger user base by identifying ways to attract and maintain both human rights organizations and businesses as customers.
As part of our collaboration with Mozilla’s YouTube Regrets project in 2020, our team mapped out and analyzed YouTube controls in order to understand how users are given the illusion of control to manage and limit YouTube’s recommendations.
Technologies like Awala bridge digital divides and provide opportunities for people to connect safely, even when traditional infrastructure and politics might block their access. As part of the OTF Usability Lab, we performed a heuristic review of Awala and a review of the developer experience. Here we highlight the Developer Experience (DX), where we provided recommendations to make it easier for third-party developers to adopt the technology and suitable use cases.
We take a deeper look at three specific design challenges our team addressed in helping PREreview build a new open source platform that supports a more inclusive, community-oriented form of peer review and publication.
For the past two years, we’ve been working with PREreview to promote equity in academic publishing by helping to build a new open source platform that supports a more inclusive, community-oriented form of peer review and publication.
We interviewed 47 people and conducted 3 surveys to complete a 5-year retrospective impact report for the Mozilla Foundation’s Fellowships and Awards programs. You can read the full report here. The evaluation presents an in-depth look into the impact, strengths, and challenges of the Mozilla Fellowships and Awards programming, including recommendations for supporting leadership development in funding digital rights and internet freedom. Three key ecosystem findings: 1) Funding is essential and impactful, 2) Measuring impact is hard, and 3) Community is at the core.
Funders that offer better funding models and center the people that are supporting the infrastructure will make better funding decisions. We’re building a toolkit to help funders develop a robust understanding of digital infrastructure, and create or iterate on their own framework for funding.
As part of 2021’s virtual Mozilla Festival, our team designed an online zine-making workshop to better simulate an in-person experience and teach new designer skills. Learn how you can design a workshop of your own.
As part of the IWMF-led Coalition Against Online Violence, our team provided research and design support for the Online Violence Response Hub, a new digital resource designed to assist and inform women journalists facing threats from online bullying and harassment.
Since 2020, we've been working with our community to help rebrand Simply Secure. Here's where we are in the ongoing process of refreshing our name and identity.
With support from Internews, our team helped improve a VPN that helps human rights defenders and journalists access the internet safely. We implemented a unique usability testing process that protects user privacy and overcomes typical remote testing challenges.
Amnesty International asked our team to help improve UX design for defenders and their communities. PhishDetect, an innovative open-source browser extension for human rights.
Over the next 2 weeks, Simply Secure will be hosting five sessions at the first virtual Mozilla Festival. If you’ll be there, we’d love to see you, learn about your work, and collaborate. Come join us!
2020 was certainly different and harder than we all anticipated. Despite the challenges that 2020 brought, the team at Simply Secure did some amazing work, while also taking time to reflect and grow. We couldn’t have done this without support, collaboration, and solidarity from our community.
Learn how we helped a group of libraries to make better decisions about their own internet services through the development of an independent data visualization tool.
How might we design for trust? Learn about the importance of defaults and customization in creating trust in our work with GlobaLeaks - an open-source platform that enables anonymous and secure submission for whistleblowers.
This case study on I2P's information architecture reveals larger strategic questions around target users and offerings. Making sense of a long-standing and large community project can be a challenge, but a design process can help you navigate it.
Trust and Responsibility have been big topics recently. In the lead up to World Interaction Design Day, we'll be helping to make sense of the conversation sharing some of our understanding, gathering resources, and convening some conversion. Let's start the discussion over some tea.
In June 2018, Luminate commissioned Simply Secure to conduct human-centered design (HCD) research focused on uncovering grantees’ experiences of the funding process. The report highlights insights, feedback — including anonymized quotes and comments, and recommendations synthesized from 20 interviews + 53 survey responses.
Most of the time, honest conversations about sensitive topics happen between people who have known each other a long time, who've worked together, who've built up a foundation of trust. They don't happen when some unknown people cold-email you and ask to make a one-hour appointment with you – right?
Design is all about making decisions. From a rebrand to a feature specification, from a new product to a new logo, every design change presents you with a fresh set of decisions. Personas are a way to help with those decisions.
While bigger companies have entire departments that do product design and market research, it can be difficult for smaller, distributed teams on a budget to get user feedback. We compiled a session guide to test your app with small groups, ideal for quick feedback at conferences and meetups.
Today we are announcing our search for our next Executive Director. Outgoing Executive Director Sara 'Scout' Sinclair Brody shares her thoughts as we approach this transition.
This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES ‘17) showcased numerous internet of things (IoT) devices but was found wanting when it came to security concerns. In his UX of IoT report from CES, Scott Jenson assesses that “companies really, really, …
One of the highlights of HybridConf 2016 was hearing writer Stevyn Colgan talk about his time as a police officer at London’s Scotland Yard. He entertained the audience of UX designers and front-end developers with stories from his book, Why Did the …
Last week, I encountered discussions of drones in two unimaginably different contexts: in an academic presentation at USENIX Security 2016 and on the TV comedy Portlandia. As distant genres, they offer different perspectives that have equally …
Web browsers are utility software; they are designed to work for all people. Not only must their features meet the needs of average members of a population, they must also work for people with special needs. As Firefox says on its mobile …
I was in Darmstadt for Privacy and Security Week last week to present Simply Secure’s work on ethics in user research at HotPETS. You can check out the paper and slides on GitHub.
Resources for ethical research In 2015, we did a field study that we …
If you’re new to UX design, wireframing is a powerful tool to understand how users experience your software. People with technical backgrounds benefit from wireframing because it forces them to take a step back from their coding mentality. Rather …
In this installment of our series on resources for field research, we discuss the participant’s bill of rights. Additional resources include screeners and model releases for photography.
Why Consent Matters Field research such as interviews and …
This post is part of a series explaining our publicly available resources for user research. The previous installment covered how to write screeners to recruit participants. This week, we discuss how to get model releases to share photos from user …
As you know, building great software depends on a deep knowledge of users. If you’re working on a project targeted at people who operate in high-risk situations, such as activists and journalists, it can be hard to get the quality insight you need to …
A screener is a questionnaire that helps researchers recruit the most appropriate participants for their user study research.
Here is an example we used for our mobile messaging study in NYC. Blue Ridge Labs handled the recruiting. Most of this …
Building great software requires understanding what users want and need. If you’re building privacy-preserving software, this includes understanding the privacy threats that your users face. One of the participants in Ame’s NYC study.
When Ame set …
On Monday I had the pleasure of speaking at a Workshop on Cryptographic Agility and Interoperability held at the National Academies by the Forum on Cyber Resilience.
The assembled group of academics, policy-makers, and practitioners touched on a …
Chatbots, or conversational programs that simulate interactive human speech patterns, are a hot topic in UX right now. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently claimed that “bots are the new apps”, and that they are the interface of the future for tasks …
For the past two years John Maeda (whose previous roles include Professor at the MIT Media Lab and President of the Rhode Island School of Design) has issued a Design In Tech Report. This influential analysis, which Maeda presents at SXSW and has …
When you’re putting your heart and soul into designing, building, or improving a piece of software, tuning in to feedback from users can sometimes get you down.
Imagine waking up one morning and finding your project is being mentioned on Twitter in a …
Simply Secure focuses its collaborative efforts on open-source, privacy-preserving software projects. In my conversations with designers, developers, and end users, I’m often struck by a divergence in their understanding of what “openness” means in …
Software communicates its values via its user experience (UX) by making some actions easy and others harder. For example, mobile apps can be configured to automatically opt users in to location sharing, and require people to dig through multiple …
Your team has reached the stage where you need to hire a professional designer. Maybe you want to finally get a great-looking logo, make a website that doesn’t look like it was designed in 1996, or create a really compelling video for your …
I really enjoyed my time at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, Spain. I was inspired and humbled to meet so many talented people as part of a global event about internet freedom. From powerful conversations about privilege to UX design jam …
This is the first in a short series of posts looking at Facebook’s “Privacy Checkup” feature. This installment examines why even privacy advocates who avoid social-media sites should take time to understand it and related user experiences. The next …
Many regular readers of our blog have already drunk the metaphorical Kool-Aid. You know that a good user experience is critical to an app’s success; moreover, you know that when a piece of software seeks to preserve its users’ privacy, a poor UX can …
We are pleased to announce a new collaboration with the Open Technology Fund as part of their Usability Lab project. This exciting initiative will allow open-source software projects to apply for free assistance with user-experience (UX) design as …
Messaging with friends and colleagues is rewarding – but sharing contact information is awkward. Many people want to preserve their privacy by carefully controlling who gets their contact information, and choose not to broadcast their email address …
It’s always great to attend security and privacy conferences in person. But in cases where you have to miss an event, online videos of the talks can be a great way to stay current with the ongoing conversation.
Art, Design, and The Future of Privacy …
Last week I went to the O’Reilly Design Conference and enjoyed learning about emerging UX trends. The conference was full of high-quality presentations on UX practice. Here are three of my favorite talks.
The Many Minds of the Maker Knight-Mozilla …
Last week Gus and I gave a talk at Shmoocon in DC. The focus was on helping technologists who don’t have experience in human-centered design processes conduct basic research to improve their existing open-source tools.
We covered four basic steps …
This week we joined nearly 200 other organizations, companies, and individuals in signing an open letter to the world’s governments calling for them to protect the integrity of online security, and to not undermine it by weakening, limiting, or …
Sketching storyboards – cartoon-like drawings showing how people use technology – is a way to get more, high-quality ideas for product design. Sketches are useful for taking notes during a discussion and for getting a team on the same page. Fine art …
2015 was our first full year in operation, and we’ve come a long way! Looking back at the past twelve months, here are some resources that we’ve found to be particularly useful (or entertaining). Let us know your favorites on Twitter!
Ame’s picks …
It can be hard to communicate about security-related features with users who aren't already security experts. From word choice to the level of detail included, it's easy to overwhelm people with information, leave them scared, or bore them to …
Simply Secure is a non-profit organization, and we rely on donations to be successful in our work of getting privacy-preserving software in the hands of more people.
To celebrate our official recognition by the IRS as a 501(c)3 organization – which …
We are pleased to announce a new collaboration with the Open Technology Fund as part of their Usability Lab project. This exciting initiative will allow open-source software projects to apply for free assistance with user-experience (UX) design as …
Recent attacks byDaesh in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, and Paris have fanned the flames of an ongoing debate about software that is resistant to surveillance. It seems that some participants in that debate are trying to use these attacks as an excuse to …
Style guides specify the look and feel of how a company or team communicates with the outside word. Styleguides.io collects examples of website visual standards that maintain a consistent online presence. Brand guidelines typically focus on how logos …
My recent post describing some of the reasons we choose Slack over IRC for our public forum is part of a larger conversation people are having around the promise and concerns of group-communication tools. A quick search for “Slack vs. IRC” yields a …
Users of the Facebook iPhone app were recently surprised by a new feature offering to “Add the last link you copied?” into a status update. Many people did not expect to see a complete URL that they had put onto the clipboard from another app, …
Last week Simply Secure hosted a pilot workshop called Underexposed. A small group came together in San Francisco to:
Share successes and challenges in secure user experiences. Describe processes and wishes for successful collaboration between …
We prefer to use open-source software as a matter of principle. We believe that putting software code in the open is the best way for the public to build trust in it.
You might find it curious, then, that we choose to foster communication and …
This week we’ve been busy in New York City meeting with our advisors and co-hosting Art, Design, and the Future of Privacy. It was gratifying to see so many people turn out to discuss creative ways of approaching an issue that is dear to our hearts, …
We’re headed to NYC next week for our annual Advisors’ Meeting. While we’re there we’re thrilled to be partnering with Dis Magazine to host Art, Design, and the Future of Privacy. If you’re in the area, please join us; the event is free and open to …
Researchers who want to evaluate software interfaces have a number of tools at their disposal. One option for identifying obvious and significant problems is an expert review, which is often used to catch low-hanging fruit before performing any kind …
The latest Harvard Business Review (paywall, but with limited free content) has two articles about design thinking that are relevant for teams working on security and privacy: Design for Action by Tim Brown and Roger Martin and Design Thinking Comes …
As a practitioner of Human-Centered Design, empathy is a core skill in the work I do. In No Flex Zone: Empathy Driven Development, Duretti Hirpa writes about how empathy can be a competitive advantage.
“We build software for all kinds of people, and …
This week we are marking the sudden passing of our Operations Manager, Nóirín “Trouble” Plunkett, who introduced themselves here just a few short months ago. We are heartbroken, and it has been hard to come to terms with this unexpected loss. Ame and …
Last week I went to the SOUPS conference in Ottawa. As a first-time attendee, it was a good opportunity to connect with some members of the academic usable-security community. One of the highlights was keynote speaker Valerie Steeves.
Steeves, …
Thank you to everyone contributing to the Simply Secure Slack channel. If you’re interested in joining, email [email protected] for an invitation. I’m especially eager to get more UX people in privacy and security involved, so spread the word. …
I really enjoyed being part of the emerging-work track, HotPETS, at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium earlier this month. From meeting lots of great people to getting face-time with the Simply Secure team, Philadelphia was fun.
Scout and I …
I’m Maina, and I’m excited to start out as a Senior Fellow at Simply Secure. Prior to this fellowship, I conducted research at the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt, and the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Using both quantitative and …
You’ve already met Gus, and we’re looking forward to introducing you to Maina, the other Fellow that Simply Secure is hosting under the auspices of Open Tech Fund’s Secure Usability Fellowship Program.
Ours are not the only SUFP fellows, however – …
Hi, everyone! I’m Gus. I am pleased to be joining Simply Secure for a one-year fellowship. For the past year and change I worked for the Open Internet Tools Project, where I pioneered their work on security usability. OpenITP being an open source organization, I had the great joy of doing all my work in public, which means everything we did is still online and publicly available.
As we gear up to start collaborating with open-source software projects, there are a bunch of things we have been pondering. There are a lot of compelling projects out there that we’d love to work with, but we need some criteria to choose which ones …
It’s difficult for many lay users who are unfamiliar with the mechanics of how the internet works to make assessments of risk or to secure their communications. One way that design can help is by making abstract concepts understandable. There’s …
You learned at our launch that we’re setting out to improve the experience users have with secure-communication tools. We told you that we want to work with the open source community, and that we’re committed to documenting our activities …
Hi, I'm Nóirín (sounds like [n̪ˠõːɾʲiːɲ]). In Ireland, I have a pretty common name: I share it with professors, politicians, and even our police commissioner! Elsewhere, however, it's less simple. I've had conference badges in the names of "N√≥ir√≠n" …
I’m Ame (sounds like “Amy”). Last month I joined Simply Secure after spending the past eight years at IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy. While there, I designed consumer technology for entertainment, education, banking, media, business …
Happy Spring! Like so much in the northern hemisphere, our blog and Twitter stream have been largely dormant for a while – but we’ve been behind the scenes getting ready for a season of tremendous growth. Since we announced Simply Secure in the fall, …
Announcing a new program for usable-security researchers We are pleased to announce one of our first initiatives – the Secure Usability Fellowship Program (SUFP) – in partnership with the Open Technology Fund. This new program aims to cultivate …
Join Our Team and Let’s Make This Happen We have ambitious goals, and the first step to meeting them is growing our team. We’re officially hiring two new positions – an Operations Manager and a Research Director (or Associate Director).
If you’re …
We’re here to make security easy and fun. Internet software links us to our friends, allows us to transact across oceans, and forms a digital space for culture and society. Because these technologies provide forums for sensitive discourse and …
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