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Design

Our application is designed to look like a familiar mobile chat application, with the pertinent details about secure communication highlighted and most of the technical details abstracted away. We felt that most of the existing solutions available were not usable by the vast majority of the population, and wanted to design something that would be secure while making encrypted communication more accessible. Thematically, we went for a very minimalist UI to further emphasize our goal to simplify encrypted communication. At a high level, the application is broken into 4 tabs, each of which provides essential functionality to the application.

GUI Section

Screenshot

Design Commentary

Login

 

The login screen was designed to ensure the application preserves security. It appears any time the application loses focus, to ensure that anytime the phone changes state, turns off, or otherwise may potentially enter an unsecure state, a password must be entered.

The screen was kept simple and unassuming with just the essential fields.

Inbox

 

The inbox is designed to look and feel like a traditional text message/chat mobile application so that learnability is made easier.

Contacts

 

The Contacts screen is where users can browse and edit the users to whom they expect to communicate securely with.

This screen is designed to look and feel much like existing contacts applications to enhance learnability.  A sorted list of known users is displayed, and can be paged through and data modified. What is unique is that the data stored includes a secure key which identifies that person (required for secure communication), and a flag to denote whether that person is known to the user. These data elements simplify the transactional needs of encrypted communication, the first of which can also be passed physically with a barcode (see My Identity below). There were debates on how much data to allow the user to see/mess around with in terms of contact data, and we settled on trying to keep things simple and uncluttered with lots of contact data.

Efficiency was taken into account when creating the delete contact feature, which can optionally also automatically remove past messages from that user so that the user doesn't have to delete them manually.

Security is also emphasized as any non-reversible tasks require a confirmation before they will execute.

My Identity

 

'My Identity' is a simple screen that shows the user's profile data, and a large 2d barcode that can be used to physically share their encryption key with another user of the application.

Heuristic feedback suggested that users were not entirely who's identity this page was meant for, so we added a new title to signify that it was their personal identity.

Settings

 

This is a basic settings screen with gives a place for the user to modify application settings. This is designed much like any typical settings screen, and as of now only allows the user to edit their password.

Implementation

Evaluation

Reflection

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