If you’re creating technology in 2025, take a hint from the feature wishlists of activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. Here’s our 2025 guide to what you should consider including in every tech tool and why.
This guide helps designers and developers adapt tech tools for high-risk contexts.
Whether you design specialized tools for high-risk contexts, or you want to create adaptable, resilient technology that can flex with different levels of risk, this list is for you. At Superbloom, our goal is to use design to help improve both types of technology. Specialized apps need to be usable in order to fulfill their promise of security; everyday apps should take higher-risk environments into account.
Our Feature Guide for High-Risk Contexts is a selection of security and privacy features that people in high-risk contexts have brought up in our research projects from 2018 to 2024. Additionally, we hosted a workshop with other designers and tool builders in the space (and hope to host more soon). We identified a menu of features that we divided into five categories:
- Features that disguise help people hide their use of a tool.
- Features that delete help people minimize data or easily make their data go away.
- Features that educate give people hints and reminders relevant to privacy and security.
- Features that welcome make a tool pleasant and straightforward to use.
- Features that support social dynamics let people use the group structures and roles that work best for them.
Our high-risk design approach
We are all at risk when participating in the modern technology ecosystem: it is powered by monetizing user data, with an experience splintered by microtargeting and governed by opaque corporate policies.
However, some environments and interactions are especially risky. People in these contexts are particularly helpful to learn from, since they often have already spent time thinking about the features, protections, and mitigations they need from their technology.
We are grateful to many activists, journalists, and human rights defenders from all over the world for sharing their do’s and don’ts with us, their wish lists and wisdom. The strategies they use and the reality of their day-to-day tech use inform our approach to design:
- Strengthen both specialized and everyday tools.
- Avoid interfering with users’ own risk-mitigation strategies.
- Offer protective features that empower users without restricting them.
- Adapt to real-world usage patterns and evolving threats.
High-risk features are for everybody
Our feature guide comes from interviews we conducted between 2018 and 2024 with people who are using technology in high-risk contexts. But given economic and geopolitical trends in 2025, these features will be helpful to everyone at some point. Risk is layered and shifts over time; factors as diverse as identity, government and corporate policies, and personal circumstances all determine how vulnerable a particular person is, at what time, and to what threats. If you have ever switched from Facebook Messenger to Signal, if you have ever closed Chrome and opened Tor, or if you have ever lowered your voice in a café, you have experienced how risk can shift based on context. At Superbloom, we want technology to support shifts in the risk landscape.
So, no matter what kind of technology you are working on, no matter who you expect will be using it, check out the 2025 edition of this feature guide. There’s a good chance some of these features make sense for you to include.
If you see something missing, please let us know. Even better, if you would like to take part in a mini-workshop to update and expand the list, reach out to us! We find that group settings work particularly well for exchanging this type of information. Write to us at [email protected].
Further resources
For a more holistic approach that integrates accessibility and usability, see Superbloom’s User Experience Toolbox for Risk Mitigation and Accessibility. It contains a wealth of higher-level resources to inform your overall process and philosophy.
Profiles:
- Personas Non Grata, a collection of adversary types by Superbloom.
- Profiles of high-risk users, part of the USABLE project by Internews.
- Profiles of adversaries, part of the USABLE project by Internews.
- Profiles of high-risk organizations, part of the USABLE project by Internews.
Libraries of interface-level suggestions:
- Decentralization Off the Shelf (DOTS): a design pattern library for usable decentralization, by Superbloom and others. For apps with decentralized structures.
- Trustworthy Design patterns for digital services, by Projects by If.
Android Security Best Practices, by Google. Aimed at developers, but also relevant at the UI level.
Credits
With thanks to Open Technology Fund User Experience & Discovery Labfor supporting this work.