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.

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.

Information security focuses on third parties’ access to user data without permission. Develop your knowledge of principles and practices to design transparent and accountable systems with our curated resources that include uses cases, emerging research issues, and the implications of current events for the field.

Our Design Spots video series provides quick answers to your UX questions.

Organizations express their values through branding (logos, interface design, style guides, etc.). We examine how branding can encourage broad adoption of privacy-preserving technology.

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.

Through UX changes, we helped guide Mailvelope users through the headaches of key management.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interoperability can help people evade government repression, document human rights violations, and have agency over their data. We take a look at interoperability and a proposed US law that could help small projects be more successful and grow faster in a web controlled by a few large companies.

Amnesty International asked our team to help improve UX design for PhishDetect, an innovative open-source browser extension for human rights defenders and their communities.

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.

How a human-centered design process brought clarity to an open-source data portal for financial journalists

Learn how design can give power back to people when it comes to algorithmic personalisation

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.

What are stress cases? When an aspect of a person or a context is pushed to an extreme, that’s a stress case. Some people refer to a stress case as an “edge case.” We prefer the term “stress case” (which we learned about from Eric Meyer and Sara …

2019 year in review

The paradox of security visual language.

Here's the difference between the current "design for trust" discourse and how trust actually works.

Why informed consent helps us design better technology – and why it's not enough.

This case study of NoScript’s UX redesign showcases tried and true design principles that make security tools usable to a wider range of audiences.

A roundup of some of the interesting research presented at SOUPS 2019.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution to ethics for design – so what's a designer to do? Eileen and Molly discuss responsibility and ethics in design in this episode of Tea Time.

Designs have impact outside of their intended scope. What are our responsibilities as designers, and what can we do to manage our impact? Eileen and Molly discuss in this episode of Tea Time.

Consistency in design helps with usability and communicates trustworthiness to users. Eileen and Molly discuss in this episode of Tea Time.

When you're transparent in your communication with users, you're communicating your trustworthiness. Eileen and Molly discuss trust and transparency in this episode of Tea Time.

Meeting users' needs is an authentic way to contribute to developing trust. Eileen and Molly discuss in this episode of Tea Time.

Designing alongside your users will make your tools respond best to their needs. We'll show you how to get instant input from your users. From our video series, Design Spots.

A complex tool can be hard to understand for new users. Here are four tips around designing for their specific needs. From our video series, Design Spots.

A quick card sorting exercise to improve the information architecture of your documentation.

Today we are announcing our fellows for our very first Underexposed Design Residency.

GDPR is around the corner, and here are our best tips.

Simply Secure is thrilled to be named as one of Fast Company’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Design for 2018.

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 …

The news this week has been full of stories about Apple's resistance to a court order demanding they build a custom backdoor to a phone used by one of the San Bernardino suspects. While I will leave deep analysis of the legal situation to experts of …

Thinking of design as not only a product but a process can help complex products stay secure as they evolve.