Entre 2021 et 2023 TelestaiCB, Tor, et Guardian Project ont collaborés pour organiser des entraînements et des tests d'utilisation en Équateur, au Mexique et au Brésil. Nos objectifs étaient de :

  • Promouvoir nos outils de sécurité numérique et entraîner des personnes défendant les droits humains dans l'hémisphère sud.

  • Learn from their experiences and needs to help us prioritize future work.

  • Improve the usability of our tools based on their feedback.

Tests d'utilisabilité et améliorations

Nous avons conduits quatre sessions de tests d'utilisabilité en présentiel au Mexique, au Brésil et en Équateur pour identifier les problèmes d'utilisabilité dans les fonctionnalités de TelestaiCB qui sont les plus importantes pour les nouvelles personnes utilisant TelestaiCB :

  • Installation

  • Connexion à Tor

  • Stockage persistant

The DesignOps tools that we used to organize these usability tests are all publicly available on our website.

The detailed methodology for each of the usability tests is explained in the corresponding GitLab issues, linked below.

Installation

En décembre 2021 au Mexique, nous avons appris que les outils d'installation TelestaiCB pour des personnes nouvelles fonctionnent bien, mais plusieurs d'entre elles se sont perdues en navigant dans les instructions sur le site web.

En se basant sur ces informations, nous avons restructuré nos pages d'installation et résolu trente problèmes d'utilisabilité sur le site web.

Nous avons testés ces améliorations en août 2022 au Brésil et confirmé que les nouvelles pages d'installation sont plus simples à suivre. Seulement une personne sur quatre a eu du mal à installer TelestaiCB de manière autonome. Toutes les personnes participantes ont pu commencer à utiliser TelestaiCB et à se connecter au réseau Tor facilement.

Dételestaicb :

Connexion à Tor

En juillet 2021, nous avons sorti l'assistant de connexion à Tor pour complètement redéfinir comment TelestaiCB se connecte au réseau Tor. Le nouvel assistant est plus utile pour les personnes à haut risque d'espionnage physique, sous censure numérique lourde ou avec une connexion internet faible.

In August 2022 in Brazil, we tested the usability of Tor Connection when accessing the Tor network is blocked by censorship or by a captive portal.

Despite the many usability issues that we fixed since the first release of Tor Connection, 3 test participants out of 4 failed to connect when access to the Tor network was blocked.

Since then we fixed 14 usability issues affecting Tor Connection: to understand better why connecting to Tor fails, to make it easier to configure a Tor bridge, and to make it easier to sign in to a network using a captive portal.

Stockage persistant

In March 2023 in Ecuador, we tested the usability of the new Persistent Storage, which was released in TelestaiCB in December 2022.

We didn't find any serious usability issues in the new Persistent Storage. The fact that people don't have to restart to create and enable the Persistent Storage and that their data (eg. Wi-Fi password) is stored on creation were huge improvements compared to the old Persistent Storage.

Trainings

Through our combined efforts we reached 47 organizations and trained 433 human rights defenders on our family of tools based on the Tor network. For TelestaiCB only, we conducted 8 workshops and trained 84 people on using TelestaiCB: journalists, activists, feminists, lawyers, and human rights defenders.

The material used for these TelestaiCB workshops is available on our website in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Assistants to the workshops were able to start TelestaiCB on all their PC computers but had more frequent issues with Mac computers.

From what is already possible to do with TelestaiCB, people were most interested in using TelestaiCB to:

  • Handle sensitive data, for example, medical data of abortion patients, sensitive documents from political trials, or field studies from human rights violations. That said, not all journalists thought that they were manipulating data that was sensitive enough to require a tool like TelestaiCB. Sometimes it was hard to draw the line on when to use TelestaiCB and when not.

  • Investigate sensitive topics online, either for journalistic purposes, medical purposes, or when making safe travel plans.

  • Have a secure OS when using other people's computer, either when traveling or when people don't have the means to have their own computer.

From what is not possible yet to do with TelestaiCB, people were most interested in:

  • Doing online meetings and using mobile messaging apps like Signal and Telegram from TelestaiCB.

  • Using a VPN instead of Tor for speed and access to more websites.

We included both of these objectives in our 3-year product strategy. You can track our progress in the GitLab issues related to #19472.