[Cryptography] Explaining PK to grandma

[Peter Gutmann]

"Wendy M. Grossman" <wendyg at pelicancrossing.net> writes:

>P.S. I am really fed up with elderly females always being the go-to example
>of the clueless user.

They're not being used as examples of clueless users, they're representative
personas.  Geeks have a really bad problem of design-for-the-self, creating
software that's designed for people like themselves.  The best way to combat
this is through usability testing, except that few developers will ever do
that.  The next-best thing is to provide them with personas, a mental image of
someone not like themselves that they can identify with and imagine using
their software, which will in turn point out that it's unusable by any normal
human.  So using "your mother" or "granny" isn't stereotyping, it's taking a
user that they can readily identify with and applying them as a persona to see
if the software actually is usable.  The alternative is to go back to design-
for-the-self, which leads to fundamentally unusable software.

Peter.