human centered 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 …

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

While bigger companies have entire departments that do product design and market research, it can be difficult for smaller, distributed teams on a budget to get user feedback. We compiled a session guide to test your app with small groups, ideal for quick feedback at conferences and meetups.

Naming software is hard because the name needs to convey a lot of meaning about what the program does to an unfamiliar audience, and do it all using only a word or short phrase. You want something memorable and easy to say – which becomes more …

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 Google unveiled a new logo as part of an updated brand identity. Professional typographic designers were swift to react. Tobias Frere-Jones, designer of Interstate and other widely-used fonts, said “I really hope this ’e’ does not become a …

As a practitioner of Human-Centered Design, empathy is a core skill in the work I do. In No Flex Zone: Empathy Driven Development, Duretti Hirpa writes about how empathy can be a competitive advantage. “We build software for all kinds of people, and …

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 …