IEEE Computer and Communications Societies and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, January 19, 2017

MIT Room E51-345

This talk is a repeat of the presentation held at Vistaprint in Waltham on Tuesday January 17. Its being given at MIT to interest students and other members of the MIT community to address authentication and security issues without destroying application usability.

Unintuitive and Insecure: Fixing the Failures of the Authentication User Experience

Jared M. Spool, co-CEO of Center Centre and founder of UIE

"Which username did I use?"
"Do they want my email address or my nickname?"
"Which password did I use?"
"What was my favorite vegetable when I created this account?"
Nothing wrecks a great user experience like a login form. Our password rules make it hard to remember what we've used, and stupid security questions lock us out of our accounts. And none of these security gymnastics actually prevent our personal information from leaking into the world. (In fact, we often inadvertently make it easier.)

If it's not usable, it's not secure. Unusable authentication systems are a bellwether of poor end-to-end experience. Once you've frustrated a user with their account creation or session authentication, it's extremely hard to win them back.

Security isn't sexy, but when we get it right, we reduce risk and increase user satisfaction. In this entertaining presentation, Jared will explain how to make authentication design a top priority in your experience architecture. He'll show you where the real risks are and why you shouldn't trust others to handle your design's security elegantly.

Jared will walk you through:

How to best protect your users without making them frustrated.
How Amazon reduces fraud and makes money with a multi-state security model.
How to keep the Paranoids at bay without degrading the user experience.

Jared M. Spool is a co-founder of Center Centre and the founder of UIE.

In 2016, with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, he opened Center Centre, a new school in Chattanooga, TN to create the next generation of industry-ready UX Designers. They created a revolutionary approach to vocational training, infusing Jared's decades of UX experience with Leslie's mastery of experience-based learning methodologies.

You'll also find him as the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual UI Conference and UX Immersion Conference, and he manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is author of the book, Web Usability: A Designer's Guide and co-author of Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work.

You'll find his writing at uie.com. You can also follow his adventures on the Twitters at @jmspool, where he tweets daily about UX design, design strategy, design education, and the wondrous customer service habits of the airline industry.

MIT building E51 is the Tang Center on the corner of Wadsworth and Amherst Sts and Memorial Dr.; it's mostly used by the Sloan School. You can see it on this map of the MIT campus. Room 345 is on the 3rd floor.

We will be taking Jared to dinner at Legal Seafood after the talk at about 9pm.

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at http://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.