Free usability help for privacy toolmakers

Simply Secure, a nonprofit I volunteer for, is launching a new series of usability programs for organizations, companies and individuals who are making cryptographic/privacy/security tools.

Simply Secure's mission is to help make privacy tools usable by normal humans, not just supernerds. We employ UX experts who offer free consulting, training, research, support and design advice to privacy projects (if you're a UX person and this sounds exciting, please get in touch about volunteering).

We've teamed up with the Open Technology Fund to pay for another year of usability assistance. If you're working on privacy tech and want to make sure that information-civilians can benefit from it, please get in touch with us about applying for support.

Eligible software projects will receive free support from design and/or research professionals to evaluate and improve the quality of their project’s UX. Simply Secure will work with your project to identify the type of support will be most useful, and scope a well-defined set of activities that can be accomplished over the period of a few weeks.

Potential activities include:

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Expert reviews to identify opportunities for improving the UX

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Usability studies to evaluate a newly-proposed feature

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Design sprints to harmonize the visual look-and-feel between an app and its website

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Program evaluations to examine a team’s process for getting feedback from its users

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Strategy research to help a team identify and understand its user population

In addition to matching software teams with skilled designers and researchers, Simply Secure will collaborate with engineers and UX professionals to ensure good communication over the course of the project. Simply Secure will also work with the software team after the design or research phase is complete, to make sure they are successful in incorporating the findings into their next development cycle. Finally, Simply Secure will work with software teams to transparently share the results of the collaboration, bringing open-source values to UX work.