Evaluating the usability of usage controls in electronic collaboration

Abstract

Currently, collaborations often require non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). NDAs can be time-consuming and expensive to negotiate and enforce. Usage controls could be an atractive alternative or adjunct to NDAs. Usage controls enable the distributor of a file to limit how recipients of that file may use it. However, existing usage controls (e.g., PDF's) often are software-based and easy to break. They may not interoperate, and their impact on collaborative workflows is typically unknown. We designed and implemented operating system and Web server and browser modifications that allow hardware-based usage controls to be easily added to existing software-based ones. This paper describes and evaluates our system's user interfaces. In a user study, untrained users role-played design engineers in two similar collaborative scenarios with or without usage controls. Users found the interfaces easy to use, and usage controls had insignificant impact on the completion times and accuracy of the assigned tasks. These results suggest that our usage control approach can add security to collaborative workflows with minimal training and performance penalties.