What clocks can tell us about usability

 

Information security is easy. You just want to keep unauthorized users from getting data that they’re not allowed to get and let authorized users get the data that they’re allowed to get. That doesn’t sound that hard, does it? You can do that by using cryptography. How hard can that be?

I may be even more biased than the typical information security person. Except for a few years working in mergers and acquisition consulting, I've been working with cryptography for over 20 years and I’ve more or less figured out how things work by now. I've actually never thought that it was that difficult, but I also understand that not everyone feels this way about it. So although I can both encrypt and decrypt S/MIME messages, I also understand that most people find it hard. Mechanical clocks played a role in getting me to understand this.

Every time I visit the British Museum, I visit the horological gallery, a collection of over 300 spectacular examples of mechanical clocks and watches from medieval times onwards. This exhibit makes me feel lucky that I was born in the twentieth century. If I had been born in medieval times I would probably have only had the skills to qualify for the position of village idiot. I can look at medieval clocks for hours and still not quite understand how they work. I apparently just don't have the right aptitude needed to understand mechanical clocks.

Many people in the information security industry would probably benefit from a similar experience. The people who make security products are often very out of touch with what the average user can and can’t do, but understanding this would almost certainly help them make better products. Many enterprise security architects would also benefit from this for a similar reason.

Both of these groups often assume that just because a technology seems simple to them that it’s simple to everyone. That’s often not the case. Sometimes, it’s not even close. Useful technologies even need to be usable by those of us who don’t quite understand how those clocks work.