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

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.

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.

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!

FileZilla is a popular open-source file transfer protocol (FTP) tool. As part of the Open Technology Fund Usability Lab, we worked with the FileZilla Server team to complete user research and provide design recommendations toward the goal of guiding users on how to set up TLS certificates with explanation and reassurance. Here we share how we tackled a technical challenge as designers through strategic knowledge gathering.

In partnership with the New Design Congress, our team prepared a new research report examining consent in complex data systems.

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 PhishDetect, an innovative open-source browser extension for human rights defenders and their communities.

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 …

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

How can design help make your tool more secure? We have three places to start. From our video series, Design Spots.

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 …