Lab Study Dataset: Fast and Secure Contact Exchange in Groups

This record contains the lab study dataset and evaluation R source code from the paper "Sounds Good? Fast and Secure Contact Exchange in Groups" by Florentin Putz, Steffen Haesler, and Matthias Hollick in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW '24). Abstract: Trustworthy digital communication requires the secure exchange of contact information, but current approaches lack usability and scalability for larger groups of users. We evaluate the usability of two secure contact exchange systems: the current state of the art, SafeSlinger, and our newly designed protocol, PairSonic, which extends trust from physical encounters to spontaneous online communication. Our lab study (N=45) demonstrates PairSonic's superior usability, automating the tedious verification tasks from previous approaches via an acoustic out-of-band channel. Although participants significantly preferred our system, minimizing user effort surprisingly decreased the perceived security for some users, who associated security with complexity. We discuss user perceptions of the different protocol components and identify remaining usability barriers for CSCW application scenarios. Dataset: Our pseudonymous dataset contains usability, security, and preference scores, completion times, reported usage of nine types of social and collaborative tools, and seven demographic and control variables, for each of our 45 participants. Analysis source code: Our R Markdown source code includes the full reproducible code of our analysis. This code generates all statistical figures from our paper. The code can also be used to reproduce our quantitative results and tables. Please refer to the README.md file and our paper for further details about the dataset and the lab study. Acknowledgments: This work has been funded by the LOEWE initiative (Hesse, Germany) within the emergenCITY center [LOEWE/1/12/519/03/05.001(0016)/72].