Understanding the ways in which information achieves widespread public awareness is a research question of significant interest. We consider whether, and how, the way in which the information is phrased — the choice of words and sentence structure — can affect this process. To this end, we develop an analysis framework and build a corpus of movie quotes, annotated with memorability information,...

There are many things that are ‘well known’ about passwords, such as that uers can’t remember strong passwords and that the passwords they can remember are easy to guess. However, there seems to be a distinct lack of research on the subject that would pass muster by the standards of applied psychology. Here we report a controlled trial in which, of four sample groups of about 100 first-year stu...

This work presents a usability evaluation performed during the field-test of a speech based data-entry system. The application domain is the data-entry of personnel absence records from a huge historical paper archive. The system was tested by 12 employees of the personnel office of a public administration. The evaluation, based on the well known usability engineering paradigm, analyzed five hu...

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines Usability of a product as “the extent to which the product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” Usability has five attributes: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and user satisfaction. Depending on the type of applica...

This doctoral research aims to persuade users to choose and remember more secure text passwords. The first component involved user studies demonstrating that users can be persuaded to create more secure text passwords. Unfortunately, the stronger passwords were not as memorable as we had hoped. For the second component, we will attempt to improve password memorability by providing implicit feed...

Mobile applications provide increasingly complex functionality through form-based user interfaces, which requires effective solutions for navigation on small-screen devices. This paper contributes a comparative usability evaluation of four navigation design patterns: Scrolling, Tabs, Menus, and Collapsible Fieldsets. These patterns were evaluated in a case study on social network profile pages....

Providing appealing brand names to newly launched products, newly formed companies or for renaming existing companies is highly important as it can play a crucial role in deciding its success or failure. In this work, we propose a computational method to generate appealing brand names based on the description of such entities. We use quantitative scores for readability, pronounceability, memora...

The natural input memory (NIM) model is a new model for recognition memory that operates on natural visual input. A biologically informed perceptual preprocessing method takes local samples (eye fixations) from a natural image and translates these into a feature-vector representation. During recognition, the model compares incoming preprocessed natural input to stored representations. By comple...

Text-based passwords alone are subject to dictionary attacks as users tend to choose weak passwords in favor of memorability, as well as phishing attacks. Many recognition-based graphical password schemes alone, in order to offer sufficient security, require a number of rounds of verification, introducing usability issues. We suggest a hybrid user authentication approach combining text password...