Designing for user awareness and usability : An evaluation of authorization dialogs on a mobile device

Abstract: Personal data is often disclosed with every registration, sharing, or request of an online service. With the increased usage of things connected to the Internet, users' information being collected and stored, the risks related to unknowingly sharing personal data increases. Sharing of personal information is a sensitive subject and can hurt people’s assets, dignity, personal integrity and other social aspects. In general, users’ concerns have grown regarding protecting their personal information which has led to the development of multiple privacy-oriented systems. In scenarios where users are logging onto a website or system, they rarely notice, understand or have desire to read the conditions to which they are implicitly agreeing. These systems are often referred to as identity management systems or single sign-on systems. Recent studies have shown that users are not aware of what data transactions take place by using various authentication solutions. It is critical for these types of system dealing with privacy that researchers examine users' understanding of the concepts through interface design. The purpose of this study is to investigate the usability and user awareness of data transactions for identity management systems on mobile devices by constructing and evaluating different design concepts. Therefore, four different mobile prototypes were designed (called CREDENTIAL Wallet) and explored to measure the usability and also the user awareness of users’ disclosures. 20 usability tests were conducted per prototype. Multiple conclusions can be drawn from this study. The findings showed that the drag-and-drop prototype scored a high user awareness score in terms of participants remembering their shared data and having a good idea of them not sharing more data than they had actually shared. Consequently, the drag-and-drop prototype achieved the highest usability result. A prototype that utilized swiping was created to fit the mobile medium. The prototype showed the highest user awareness score in the context of participants stating what data they had shared. However, people using the swiping prototype thought they were sharing more data than they actually were. Data show that users have an incorrect mental model of the sharing of their fingerprint pattern. Finally, the writing concerns recommendations and challenges of identity management systems – e.g. the importance of tutorial screens. Future studies within the CREDENTIAL project are already underway concerning users' incorrect mental model of sharing fingerprint to the service provider side.