Design

This month, we are taking some time to catch up with our UXFund grantees, and learn a little more about their organization.

SecureDrop is an open source software platform that allows secure sharing and communication between journalists and their sources. Under the UXFund, Internews contracted an individual UX designer to work with the SecureDrop team to support the creation of a user-friendly, integrated SecureDrop workstation.

Mailvelope is a free software for end-to-end encryption of email traffic which is integrated within browsers as an extension. Through this round of the UXFund, Mailvelope was able to release the latest version of the tool with user-experience (UX) and user-interface (UI) changes that were recommended by a team of UX designers as well as accessibility updates that were recommended by Accessibility Lab.

KeePassXC (KPXC), a recipient of one of the UXFund subgrants, is an open source password manager that is maintained by a small group of volunteer developers.

What is your organization? And what is your role? Simply Secure is a design nonprofit based in New York and Berlin.

Accessibility Lab, based in Mexico, is an organization that works with public and private companies as well as Civil Society Organizations to ensure the inclusion of people with disabilities in the digital world.

Okthanks, an organization focused on user experience and human-centered design, received a 9 month grant from the USABLE project to expand their capacity working with open-source privacy and security tool teams and digital security trainers around the globe.

The USABLE project has harnessed the knowledge of the digital security training community to build personas of high-risk users from around the globe.

Connecting developers with users improves tools for human rights defenders Janvier Hakizimana has a radical idea. “Governments and large global bodies like the United Nations subsidize new medications to fight disease.

At the Security and Design Workshop, we realized that our original plan of book-ending a classic digital security training with human centered design exercises was not ideal – many elements of learning and exploration that are key to training are similarly core to collaborative design.

The USABLE project is built around a core commitment to listen - to users, to trainers, and to our partners. As we began assembling the team of amazing designers and usability experts we are working with, a common thread emerged around a desire to connect and frame their inputs as usability experts for the digital security space and map out how they would engage during the tool feedback trainings.