Empirical Investigations on Usability of Security Warning Dialogs: End Users Experience

Abstract

The dependencies of the computer and the Internet keep increasing among the users. Thus, it poses to the increasing number of attacks as a result of using various application and tools. Security warning conveys an alert on the potential harm users might expose such as malware and any kind of attacks on their computer. In practice, most of the end users tend to ignore the security warning as it shows the messages repeatedly, although they have been exposed to many risks. A security warning dialogue is supposed to catch the user’s attention and comprehension however, because of users’ past experiences such habituation makes them became less focus. One-to-one interview session with 60 participants was conducted in order to gain further comprehension among the end users experiencing security warning and to investigate the usability issues of current security warning implementation. It is deemed of necessity to discover these usability issues in the current context of security warning presentations. The result revealed that the problems and challenges continue to persist such as difficulties to make a decision, difficulties to comprehend technical jargons, lack of attractiveness of current security warning and issues of habituation or repeated exposures of warnings.