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More emphasis on security would have been helpful. I understand that the design background is necessary, however, the first 2-3 weeks of material especially could have been grounded more in security and privacy applications and use cases. This got better as the course progressed.

The instructor was great; easy to understand but aimed at adults, materials were well prepared and organized. Supplemental readings and videos were mostly applicable, with the initial caveat above.

Quiz and final questions were well written for the level of complexity of the material covered. Writing good questions is not trivial, and based on the material in this course I am confident that Dr. Golbeck would write more challenging but *equally* cogent and coherent quiz and test questions. This course is better than others I have taken from Coursera on this very important point; Not difficulty, cogency.

In regards to biometric security systems, one item that was not covered was that if the system that _confirms_ your identity is compromised, your biometric profile could be shared on the dark web. If an account at service foo.com is compromised, but I follow good security practices, then the impact of that event is minimal. If the method of identification is biometric, that "password" will correctly identify me in any comparable system for the rest of my life. This is a significant and often overlooked consequence of these types of systems, and the specifics of the implementation (where is the biometric stored; how strongly is it encrypted etc.) make an enormous difference here.

Though I appreciate the need of making systems more usable, I was disappointed that there was no explicit discussion of adaptive security based on the threat model of the individual. For example; as a computer engineer with professional interest in security, I find the use of 2FA to be an *enhancement* of the usability of the system. I prefer services that provide the option of configuring a security interface that matches my threat model. As an advanced user, I would not be at all frustrated by having to find the advanced settings to configure - say a yubikey - preventing it from complicating a "normal" interface for a standard user. Protonmail is a good example here. They provide two keys, one for the server, one for the client, and they default to a mechanism that is marginally less secure but seamless for new users, but that lets those with more complex threat models (the PC way of saying "paranoid?") to opt for something more befitting the use case of a victim of domestic abuse, or reporter on a hostile government.

In the section on privacy - which on the whole was excellent - one question that should have been asked is "What motivates a company to opt for an obscure, hard to 'use' privacy policy?". This was certainly subtext, but I think this discussion should be stimulated even if no quiz or test question requires a student to take a particular position on the issue.

Though as a student of security (and interested in the certificate for all five courses) a more advanced course would have been welcome, I look forward to sharing the final Ted Talk lecture and some other materials with my less technical friends and my less security conscious colleagues.

Thanks Dr. Golbeck for the course!

-- md

Was a better course than the other reviewers tended to complain about. Taking the examples literally might not be the best actionable route to completing a lot of the quizzes and final exam, its mostly theory on how to build sustainable and efficient systems while at the same time ensuring the security of them has the least effect on the usability of the information system or applications in mind.

Some of the videos were somewhat off topic and seemed to not actually be related to what was on the quizzes at the end of the weeks topic. Some questions on quizzes weren't explained or only hinted at in the videos only to be the main topic in the next week. Other than that, a solid course.

Agradezco mucho a la instructora Dra. Jenifer Golbeck, por el curso que esta bien explicado, he podido entender y comprender Fundamentos de la interacción humano-ordenador: usuarios, usabilidad, tareas y modelos cognitivos que me hacia mucha falta.

Para terminar este Curso lo elegí por que me gusta la ciberseguridad y pensé en estudiar un poco de ella, como informático era forma parte de mis sueños al menos saber lo poco de cada cosa que esta en relación con la ciencia de la información así para poder ayudar a mi país o al mundo en general, gracias una vez más felices fiestas y prospero año nuevo.

Security in a design perspective was not somthing I took in consideration for the longedt time. I wasaware of the undirect cost that security solutions might present, especially on user exprience, but the idea of usability going hand in hand with security to create more secure systems was, honestly, mind blowing!

Also the material and the concept were very neatly explaned, very easy to understand to someone who is new to design. Great course!

The course is a fantastic start to usability security. It focuses on the core concepts and I think for everyone trying to enter into the security domain the idea of designing security putting user's tasks in mind helps one become a better cyber security professional. Special appreciation to the instructor for teaching style.

One con would be, the course contents could be updated at few places to match the current technology advances.

I think this course is very good at providing introductory information on usable security which is good for people who are not looking to specialize in this, but instead will use it to supplement their existing work practices. However, the course is definitely outdated at the time of my writing this. Many of the examples feel a bit out of touch considering the rapid pace at which the security/privacy landscape evolves.

In general I thought this course was excellent. Some of the content - mainly the "interviews" were difficult to follow and of poor quality. I also thought that some of the quiz questions were too ambiguous and I'd even argue that some of the 'correct' answers were wrong.

That said, I would highly recommend this course and came out of it with loads of useful knowledge and thoughts on how I can improve my work.

Some of the topics and methods used in this course are obsolete. For example, choosing 4 commonly known words to make a password up - an attacker can do a combined dictionary attack (and most people won't know very many rare words which is needed to increase the complexity of the password). It was a fun course to do though. Would suggest a revamp with current technologies and methodologies considered in it.

I just completed the course. This course is recommended to beginners like me because I learned a new perspective to cyber security. It is exciting to see the psychological aspects in cyber security. I would have given more rating if social engineering is explained too. This is just an introduction to the course and may not be appealing for people already in the field which should be expected anyway.

Very good, it gave me a user perspective and social hacking perspective about security. As a programmer I used to think only about bringing complex flows and technical protections that would make the systems I worked on hard to use. I would suggest more practical exercises. Some lectures were just info with no practices. And to me as a student and teacher is very important for memorization! :)

I think this was a very well-thought out course. In my opinion, it was well presented, contained very useful information, was accessible to someone with a limited background in cybersecurity, and used plenty of real examples to back-up its claims. An area that could use improvement is testing: some of the quizzes provided questions that seemed hard to follow, particularly the "choose

Excellent overview of the crucial intersection of privacy & usability, highly recommended for anyone designing or building secure systems. Only complaint was the quizzes sometimes had answers that were either too easy to guess, or else the wording was sometimes ambiguous and difficult to understand. For the most part though, this is valuable information & the readings are good too.

In general, I liked this course very much. However, I am not sure and have no way of telling from the content how relevant the course material still is. Most reading is from the mid 2000s and newer screenshots are from 2014. I know it's an academic course but still it seems dated occasionally (I mean talking about Firefox 2). Also, some links to the readings are outdated.

Giver a completely different perspective of usable security in which security and usability go hand in hand enhancing each other contrary to the traditional security, functionality and cost triad.

Broadens thinking that a usable security is preferable than classic hard security measures not aligned to its usability aspects.

Thank you so much for enlightenment you offered.

The explanations given here were well detailed, nevertheless there are some parts of the videos which doesn't match the subtitle. Some of the interface (applications used to explain some aspects of this course are not up to date). So As far as possible this course need to be updated ( at least the applications used or interface used here to make some experiment).