user research

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.

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 …

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

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.

User research is about surfacing behavioral insights to design products. Build your knowledge of user research, including methods for conducting user interviews and ethics

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

Doing data handling with privacy and security in mind means spending some time to identify different threats, culminating in a threat model, and coming up with strategies that fit the particular threat model. We've compiled some best practices for both risk assessment and security strategies.

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.

These are additional considerations for conducting user research involving high-risk participants. From our video series, Design Spots.

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 …