Managing User Experience: Usability and Security in a New Era of Software Supremacy

Software is now the driving force behind our daily lives. At work, everyone is affected to a greater or lesser extent by software, which exerts a significant influence in every activity of our daily lives. It is clear that software and the way it interacts with humans has a significant impact on the life and future of everyone who uses it. There is thus a self-evident need to balance usability and security, with usability now defined as an outcome of a product's interaction rather than a property inherent to that product, and assessed by means of usability evaluations rather than by measurements. Still, the problems of achieving a balance between usability and security remain. Recent research would indicate that the concept of 'user experience' needs to be broken down into the complementary factors of usability and security to create new methodologies for producing modern, reliable, user-friendly software. The current paper moves into this direction by presenting scientific definitions for the concepts of 'user experience', 'usability' and 'security', their extensions and implications, and the research which has explored ways of harmonizing usability and security in contemporary software. It highlights how hard this is to achieve and how important it is for the software industry to incorporate the concept of 'user experience' into usability-security so as to develop products capable of automatically adapting to any given environment or user.