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Between 2021 and 2023 TelestaiCB, Tor, and the Guardian Project partnered to organize training and usability tests in Ecuador, Mexico, and Brazil. Our goals were to:

  • Promote our digital security tools and train human rights defenders in the Global South.

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

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

Usability tests and improvements

We conducted 4 rounds of in-person moderated usability tests in Mexico, Brazil, and Ecuador to identify usability issues in the features of TelestaiCB that are most important to new users:

  • Installazione

  • Tor Connection

  • Archivio Persistente

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.

Installazione

In December 2021 in Mexico, we learned that the tools for new users to install TelestaiCB worked well, but several people got lost while navigating the instructions on the website.

Based on these findings, we restructured our installation pages and fixed 30 usability issues on the website.

We tested these improvements in August 2022 in Brazil and confirmed that the new installation pages were much easier to follow. Only 1 out of 4 participants had trouble installing TelestaiCB on their own. All participants could start TelestaiCB and connect to the Tor network easily.

Details:

Tor Connection

In July 2021, we released the Tor Connection assistant to completely redesign how to connect TelestaiCB to the Tor network. The new assistant is most useful to people who are at high risk of physical surveillance, under heavy network censorship, or on a poor Internet connection.

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.

Archivio Persistente

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.