design

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.

Designing for Security

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We asked our community what they think of the name "Simply Secure" and our cheerful aesthetic. Here's what we found out.

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.

Instead of learning methods and tools, you can start by developing a design mindset. From our video series, Design Spots.

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

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.

Get prepared to discuss security with more technical team mates. If you’re a designer, learn useful background information.

My last post examined the concept of phishing, which is a type of social-engineering attack to con people into divulging private information like passwords or credit card numbers. When you look for advice on how to protect against phishing, most of …

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 …

Most people who spend time online have a general idea of what “phishing” is, but it can be hard for folks outside of the security community to pin down an exact definition. Understanding the threat that phishing attacks pose can help designers and …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

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 …