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Improving the Usability of Security Features in Tools and Applications
Rangarajan B, Furnell SM
Advances in Communications, Computing, Networks and Security Volume 8, ISBN: 978-1-84102-293-2, pp97-105, 2011
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The purpose of this research is to identify, investigate and improve the usability of security features in tools and application. Users and application developers can benefit by the end of this research after understanding the concepts of usability and how an alternative approach can be useful among the tech-savvy users as well as product developers who can think of making a security much more usable and effective. The main objective of the research is to investigate the issues surrounding the usability of security features in various tools and applications and try to familiarize with the issues. Further, a specific security tool is taken for study and based on which, a usability study is carried out in order to find out the users’ attitude level on usability as well as how they understand the security features present in a tool. Also developers too need to focus more on usability and make the users more attracted towards using a product more freely than any constraints. The analysis section of the usability study would be helpful in identifying the common usability issues and participant’s attitude level towards handling the security features present in an antivirus application. Based on which, a mock interface implementation would be designed and developed & try to make the security feature more usable. This would benefit end-users and product developers for the future works

Rangarajan B, Furnell SM