BU Research Blog

I am delighted to announce that our first Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Seminar will take place on Tuesday, 15th October at 5pm.  The seminar will take place in EB202 in the Executive Business Centre, and will be open to all.  As promised in my previous post, these seminars will be approachable, and require nothing more than a general interest in security, and an enquiring mind.

Our speaker will be Chris Porter from University College London. Chris Porter is a PhD candidate within the Information Security Research Group in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. His research focuses on the design process of identity-centric e-government services together with associated collaborative tools.

Talk Abstract: Design decisions have an impact on the end-user’s experience, and this could in turn influence the end user’s decision making process (e.g. on whether to use an e-service and/or comply with given security requirements). This talk will introduce Sentire, a technique that adapts and merges traditional software engineering techniques with UX (User Experience) and human-centric design principles. This technique, together with associated collaborative tools, helps designers and system developers quantitatively assess and compare the impact that various design decisions can have on the user’s experience (e.g. workload, willingness to complete the task). Persona Calibration, the driving technique behind Sentire, aims at eliminating the turn-around time (and costs) required to get feedback from end-users (required to pinpoint potentially risky decisions) and the concept of a re-usable persona library becomes central to the whole idea. Calibrated Personas are introduced as part of the requirements specification process. The technique has been applied to design decisions specific to e-government service enrolment processes, and some initial results will be presented giving us more scope for a general discussion/Q&A.