005 Computerprogrammierung, Programme, Daten
Refine
Departments, institutes and facilities
Document Type
- Conference Object (8) (remove)
Year of publication
- 2017 (8) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- no (8)
Keywords
- Design (1)
- Design patterns (1)
- Elderly (1)
- Frontend architecture (1)
- Living Lab (1)
- Microservices (1)
- Mobility (1)
- Participatory Design (1)
- Qualitative Study (1)
- Qualitative research (1)
Usable security puts the users into the center of cyber security developments. Software developers are a very specific user group in this respect, since their points of contact with security are application programming interfaces (APIs). In contrast to APIs providing functionalities of other domains than security, security APIs are not approachable by habitual means. Learning by doing exploration exercises is not well supported. Reasons for this range from missing documentation, tutorials and examples to lacking tools and impenetrable APIs, that makes this complex matter accessible. In this paper we study what abstraction level of security APIs is more suitable to meet common developers’ needs and expectations. For this purpose, we firstly define the term security API. Following this definition, we introduce a classification of security APIs according to their abstraction level. We then adopted this classification in two studies. In one we gathered the current coverage of the distinct classes by the standard set of security functionality provided by popular software development kits. The other study has been an online questionnaire in which we asked 55 software developers about their experiences and opinion in respect of integrating security mechanisms into their coding projects. Our findings emphasize that the right abstraction level of a security API is one important aspect to consider in usable security API design that has not been addressed much so far.
Smart home systems are becoming an integral feature of the emerging home IT market. Under this general term, products mainly address issues of security, energy savings and comfort. Comprehensive systems that cover several use cases are typically operated and managed via a unified dashboard. Unfortunately, research targeting user experience (UX) design for smart home interaction that spans several use cases or covering the entire system is scarce. Furthermore, existing comprehensive and user-centered longterm studies on challenges and needs throughout phases of information collection, installation and operation of smart home systems are technologically outdated. Our 18-month Living Lab study covering 14 households equipped with smart home technology provides insights on how to design for improving smart home appropriation. This includes a stronger sensibility for household practices during setup and configuration, flexible visualizations for evolving demands and an extension of smart home beyond the location.