Crypto and UI issues

[David Mercer]

(Hopefully this is sent as ascii, as I had previously set my gmail to
send in utf-8 encoding, as I often send email in french as well as
english. -djm)

On 12/11/05, James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:
> It is not my position that inability to sign means that
> the chairman of the board is stupid.  It is that
> cryptographic signatures are too @#$%^&* hard and need
> to be made user friendly.
>
> First write software that is easy enough for your
> mother.  Then we can work on making it easy enough for
> the marketing department.

And then we can work on making it easy enough for realtors!
Seriously, that long ago became my off the cuff usability test: they
seem to have a harder time figuring out user interfaces that my 75
year old grandmother, or the marketing folks for that reason.  Sales
people are actually fairly easy to train on any given UI, so long as
you instill the proper fear into them ("if you don't do this right,
your competitor will steal your customer list, and there go all  your
commisions").

It's harder to get marketing people on board like that, as they don't
have the same direct financial levels to attack with pavlovian fear
conditioning, and CEO's are really bad, as they are used to having
secretaries do everything 'hard' with their communications gear, even
in the pre-computer era, and also are accustomed to a coterie of
handlers and PR people going around and cleaning up any messes they
inadvertently make.

But realtors, that's been my personal acid test to see if a UI is
truly easy to use.  Seriously.

And my appologies to Ben Laurie and friends, but why after all these
years is the UI interaction in ssh almost exactly the same when
accepting a key for the first time as overriding using a different one
when it changed on the other end, whether from mitm or just a
key/IP/hostname change?

Horrible, horrible UI, and I'm not sure what's worse, that or trying
to USE pgp (gpg, whatever) from a command line, or getting it
integrated into a gui mail client.
</ui rant>

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