Physical Security Metaphor for Personal Firewall Warnings
There is evidence that the communication of security risks to home computer users has been unsuccessful. Prior research has found that users do not heed risk communications, that they do not read security warning texts, and that they ignore them. Risk communication should convey the basic facts relevant to the warning recipient’s decision. In the warning science literature, one successful technique for characterizing and designing risk communication is to employ the mental models approach, which is a decision-analytic framework. With this approach, the design of risk communication is based on the recipients’ mental model(s). The goal of the framework is to help people make decisions by providing risk communication that improves the recipients’ mental models in one of three ways: (1) adding missing knowledge, (2) restructuring the person’s knowledge when it inappropriately focussed (i.e., too general or too narrow), and (3) removing misconceptions.
