TY - GEN
T1 - Peeling the onion’s user experience layer
T2 - 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2018
AU - Gallagher, Kevin
AU - Patil, Sameer
AU - Dolan-Gavitt, Brendan
AU - McCoy, Damon
AU - Memon, Nasir
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Carol Choksy for allowing us access to the students in her course. We would like to thank those who participated in our study. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback. We acknowledge Dennis Röllke, Hossein Siadati, and Santiago Torres for editorial input on draft versions of this paper. This work was made possible in part by NPRP grant 7-1469-1-273 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation) and gifts from Comcast and Google. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
PY - 2018/10/15
Y1 - 2018/10/15
N2 - The strength of an anonymity system depends on the number of users. Therefore, User eXperience (UX) and usability of these systems is of critical importance for boosting adoption and use. To this end, we carried out a study with 19 non-expert participants to investigate how users experience routine Web browsing via the Tor Browser, focusing particularly on encountered problems and frustrations. Using a mixed-methods quantitative and qualitative approach to study one week of naturalistic use of the Tor Browser, we uncovered a variety of UX issues, such as broken Web sites, latency, lack of common browsing conveniences, differential treatment of Tor traffic, incorrect geolocation, operational opacity, etc. We applied this insight to suggest a number of UX improvements that could mitigate the issues and reduce user frustration when using the Tor Browser.
AB - The strength of an anonymity system depends on the number of users. Therefore, User eXperience (UX) and usability of these systems is of critical importance for boosting adoption and use. To this end, we carried out a study with 19 non-expert participants to investigate how users experience routine Web browsing via the Tor Browser, focusing particularly on encountered problems and frustrations. Using a mixed-methods quantitative and qualitative approach to study one week of naturalistic use of the Tor Browser, we uncovered a variety of UX issues, such as broken Web sites, latency, lack of common browsing conveniences, differential treatment of Tor traffic, incorrect geolocation, operational opacity, etc. We applied this insight to suggest a number of UX improvements that could mitigate the issues and reduce user frustration when using the Tor Browser.
KW - Anonymity
KW - Privacy
KW - Tor
KW - Tor Browser
KW - UX
KW - Usability
KW - User experience
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85056808097&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85056808097&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3243734.3243803
DO - 10.1145/3243734.3243803
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85056808097
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
SP - 1290
EP - 1305
BT - CCS 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 15 October 2018
ER -