UX for Hackers: Why It Matters and What Can You Do (38c3)

The hacker community is great at making brilliant tools and solving fascinating problems, but we often suck at making the tools and solutions available to the rest of humanity - sometimes even to ourselves. UX and usability are frequently dismissed or misunderstood as the superficial art of adding unnecessary whitespace to perfectly usable things. The assumption is that the prospective users should just "get better" at using computers. That's all quite bad - but what's even worse, we often forget that the user - their human brain and their human perception - is often the biggest attack surface, and as we harden our solutions against all technical threats, we prefer to ignore this one. Over the last couple of years, I have been working on making Qubes OS - a secure operating system - more usable for both hackers and the less technically brilliant users. It has been a very interesting journey that has taught me a lot about clever hackers, so-called normal people and the way you can make security and usability work together, not against each other. In this talk, I will share those insights, show how UX and usability are in fact part of security, discuss some common human interface mistakes open source developers and hackers make - and tell you how you can improve the UX of your projects without dying inside. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/event/ux-for-hackers-why-it-matters-and-what-can-you-do/