How UX Research and Behavioural Science Can Help to Improve People’s Cyber Security Behaviours

Most of us have been there: created easy-to-hack passwords, wrote passwords down into a notebook and still forgotten them. Existing cyber security awareness campaigns have focused on various dos and don’ts. Organisations have added layers of security to stop us from being productive humans, to which we respond by creating mental and physical shortcuts that are in fact harmful to staying safe online.

Raising security awareness by ‘fear’ appeals has done us little good. Are we beyond caring? Have we accepted that there is nothing we can do? What are the barriers to good cyber security behaviours? How can UX be conducted in this environment? How can we design tailored digital interventions that (actually) change our cyber security behaviours?

In this session, you will learn how we use UX and behavioural science to build up personalised interventions for human cyber resilience. I will outline how UX, behavioural science and experimental methodologies informed the design, usability testing and personalisation of the research project platform.

By the end of this talk at least one of your cyber security behaviours has changed!