Seamless Lessons & Security (commentary)

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 05:03:58PM -0400, Ivan Krsti�? wrote:
> On Jul 7, 2008, at 4:50 PM, Hal Murray wrote:
> > Is that good enough?  I think it would work fine for paranoid  
> > security geeks,
> > but what about school children?
> 
> It's good enough because the purpose of the dialog is not to protect,  
> but to inform.

I respectfully disagree that the dialog/notification can achieve that
goal.  We're going to have to make the dialog a lot different than the
current one (which is great for what it does, I think[1]) for users to
distinguish between them.

And there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that many people think
users don't read these types of dialog boxes[2,3], as the GP and one
other have already asserted.  I don't know of any usability studies to
the contrary in this area.

I don't have anything better to suggest, though.  You've (I think)
rejected making a distinction based on local/non-local URLs, which is
the first thought that comes to mind.  Is there nothing better than
asking the user "do you really understand what you're about to do with
this link"?

> --
> Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org

Martin

1. http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-March/004486.html
2. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/01/54734.aspx
3. http://www.networkworld.com/compendium/archive/003362.html
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