Susanne M. Furman

Preserving Privacy – More Than Reading a Message

Social media has become a mainstream activity where people share all kinds of personal and intimate details about their lives. These social networking sites (SNS) allow users to conveniently authenticate to the third-party website by using their SNS credentials, thus eliminating the need of creating and remembering another username and password but at the same time agreeing to share their personal information with the SNS site. Often this is accomplished by presenting the user with a dialog box informing them that they will be sharing information. We were interested in determining if SNS users authenticating to a third-party website with their SNS credentials, were reading the informational message and if changing the message format would impact the choice to continue or cancel. Format type did not alter the participant’s choice to continue. Eye-tracking data suggests that the participants who chose to continue read some of the words in the message.

Public Safety Communication User Needs: Voices of First Responders

The public safety community is transitioning from land mobile radios to a communications technology ecosystem including a variety of broadband data sharing platforms. Successful deployment and adoption of new communications technology relies on efficient and effective user interfaces based on understanding first responder needs, requirements, and contexts of use; human factors research is needed to examine these factors. As such, this paper presents initial qualitative research results via semi-structured interviews with 133 first responders across the U.S. While there are similarities across disciplines, results show there is no easy “one size fits all” communications technology solution. To facilitate trust in new communications technology, solutions must be dependable, easy to use for first responders, and meet their communication needs through the application of user-centered design principles. During this shift in public safety communications technology, the time is now to leverage existing human factors expertise to influence emerging technology for public safety.

Mobile Phone Fingerprinting: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) relies on the use of biometrics as an important component of its mission to keep America safe. Risks are involved with the current systems that use contact fingerprint technology such as the transmission of pathogens by contacting the scanner. Touchless systems address this risk but also introduce new challenges. Sixty National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) employees participated in the study to determine the usability of three mobile phone devices as well as the image quality of the resulting fingerprint images. All participants had previous experience with capturing their prints using a contact device and as a result tried to touch the screen on the mobile phone to capture their fingerprints. All the participants had mobile phones and were aware of the phone’s features including a camera and capture process for the mobile phone devices involved using the phone’s camera to take a photo of fingerprints. We believe that participants did not equate the capture process to taking a photo of their fingers and were using an existing mental model for capturing their fingerprints and as a result they touched the phone’s glass screen. The devices provided little if any or often somewhat confusing instructions to assist the user and little if any feedback regarding the success of the capture. To study the image quality of the prints, we assisted the participants in collecting a set of prints using both the mobile phone devices and the contact field devices. We compared the image quality and the interoperability of the contactless captures with the legacy contact captures. Currently the image quality and interoperability is less than desirable.

Voices of First Responders Identifying Public Safety Communication Problems: Findings from User-Centered Interviews, Phase 1, Volume 1 | NIST

................................................................................................................................................... I EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ................................................................................................................................. II TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................................................... V LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................................... VI LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................................................... VI GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................................................. VI