Nobody wants to spend time unlocking their phones, particularly when it happens some 50 times a day. This is why both industry and academia have been figuring out how to minimize this unwanted overhead, while still keeping smartphones users secure. To improve the technology, developers need to understand how exactly users use it, what works and what does not, what are the patterns of users’ behaviour with the technology. This is the knowledge gap that LERSSE’s alumni Lina Qiu was working on addressing in her Master’s thesis research. Her research investigated the interplay between age and smartphone authentication behavior.
To do this, she performed a two-month long field study with 134 participants. The results indicate that there are indeed significant differences across age. For instance, younger participants were more likely to use biometric unlocking mechanisms and older participants relied more on auto locks. The essence of Lina’s work (co-supervised by Alex de Luca and me), in collaboration with Ildar Muslukhov (also a recent LERSSE alumni) will be presented in May at ACM SIG CHI conference, the top HCI venue in the world.
To find out more about the findings, come to her presentation at CHI in May or read now the paper.
