Vortrag: (Un)usability of Enigmail

Evaluating & improving the usability of the Enigmail Thunderbird extension (a user-friendly GPG frontend :-) ) - A Status Update

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You are concerned about your privacy on the internet and want to use opensource email encryption? Then, as an average user, you probably tried to setup Enigmail for Thunderbird and hoped you would be done with it. But then you started to notice how many details there were to know about the PGP system and that public key cryptography even existed, what key servers were, what signatures are good for. Or you didn't even get so far before you gave up and abandoned it again.
We are a team of academics and students who set out to change something about that. Our plan is to improve Enigmail's user interface and lower the barrier for beginners. To achieve this, we plan a number user evaluation/design cycles and refactor parts of the UI towards better usability. In this talk, we give you an idea of usability's state in crypto tools and present the results of our first round of steps: a heuristic evaluation with usability experts, and the design changes to we came up with to adress these findings.

"We" this: Keith Andrews, HCI expert @ IICM TU Graz, and me Ralph Wozelka, Visualisation Group Knowcenter Graz and member of Cryptoparty Graz. Carina Yasmin Enzinger and Bianca Helbig, user evalutions, students @ TU Graz. Jacqueline Rinnhofer, design and code, student @ TU Graz.

We seek participants for user evaluation of future changes!
If you are interested, contact us at the Cryptoparty Graz here: crypto[AT]2904.cc
or enigusab[AT]iicm.at