Things We Want To Learn About

This is a punchlist to track things we'd like to learn about in future user studies. They can be broader/workflow items, UI specific tidbits, or almost anything related to newsroom operations and communication between sources and journalists.

Table of Contents Things we want to learn, about... Sources (general) Newsroom people (general) Journalist Workstation UI particulars

Things we want to learn, about...

Sources (general)

• Complete Source Personas
• User testing for behavioral compliance and general comprehension
  • Get Codename screen
    • Do they understand the concepts presented on the screen?
    • What do they do with the codename: attempt memorization, write it down, blow it off, something else?
  • TOR messaging
  • Compose messages & upload things
    • GPG messaging
  • Receive replies and/or share more
    • "Delete messages to protect yr privacy" messaging

Newsroom people (general)

• Feedback form to learn about new customers...
  • How did installation go?
  • Who's an admin, and what's their background?
  • What are expectations of using the SD product?
    • Frequency to check/receive leads
    • Source engagement
  • What are domain areas of newsroom interest (from standard whistleblower domains)?
• Quantitative study of all Journalist SD users, to survey for:
  • Base demographic data (age, location, education, career tenure)
  • Standard daily toolset (analog/digital)
  • Toolset for secure document sharing or communication
  • Frequency encrypted communications or document-sharing is sought
  • Toolset for encrypted communications or document-sharing
  • Base knowledge of digital things (What kind of phone, how many hours online, doing what, home automation, etc.)
  • Base knowledge of InfoSec things (What's GPG, what's TOR, etc.)
  • How many journalists use assistive technologies?

Journalist Workstation UI particulars

• What is the possibility a freelance journalist may need access to the SecureDrop of multiple news orgs? Like "Teams" in Slack. Or, do news orgs typically restrict access to this highly sensitive material, to staff folks only? As we move towards a more distributed life and less centralized working situations, could this be a trend for scrappier news orgs in the future?
• Really need to do base Quantitative study to get a better sense of who our users are.
• Things to include in future Qualitative studies
  • General measure of comfort with Qubes OS
  • What are user expectations when selecting "Export"? Does the user expect a file will be automatically deleted, or just made into a portable format while also left on the server?
  • Read/Not-Read bolding and other paradigms potentially used in the JW UI
  • Delete flow