How to make PC security alerts better? Make them twirl, jiggle

Have you ever ignored a security alert on your PC? You’re not the only one.

The warnings are designed to save us from malware infections and hacking risks, but often times we’ll neglect them. It could be because we’re too busy or we’ve seen them too many times, and we’ve become conditioned to dismiss them — even the most serious ones, according to Anthony Vance, a professor at Brigham Young University.

Vance has been studying the problem and he’s found that introducing certain small, but noticeable changes, can make the alerts more useful and harder to ignore.  

“Our security UI (user interface) needs to be designed to be compatible with the way our brains work,” he said at the USENIX Enigma 2017 conference on Tuesday. “Not against it.”

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