Usability or Securityâor Both?
Bruce Schneier's blog posting this week about Security vs. Usability highlighted an essay by Prof Don Norman (of the Nielsen Norman Group) concerning When Security Gets in the Way.
Usability or Security: does it really have to be a choice?
It struck a chord with me since I had just been reading an article on Econsultancy.com speculating that customer's problems with 3D Secure had led to Google Checkout Dropping Payment by Maestro. You might know 3D Secure better by the scheme-specific names Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. The implementation of these schemes by banks and e-commerce merchants has been a terrible mishmash of in-line frames, pop-up windows, unbranded pages, redirects and mandatory JavaScript. Most instances have terrible usability, many raise users' security concerns and some applied the password setup and change mechanisms poorly. The article suggests merchants have found 3D Secure decreases the conversion rate. How were usability and privacy concerns addressed during each system's design? After all, the users are the banks' customers, and the credit card companies' customers and the e-tailers' customers.
Prof Norman finishes with:
Usable security and privacy: it's a matter of design.
Perfect.
Posted on: 07 August 2009 at 08:18 hrs
Comments are filtered automatically and should appear shortly after they been checked.