Reconciling usability and security: Interaction design guidance and practices for on-line user authentication

Usability and security are often portrayed as though they are competing priorities in information systems development. Given that both are essential to the design of an effective system, it is important that these two prerogatives should be reconciled. In recent years, there is growing concern with the rising incidence of on-line impersonation, theft and other types of fraud. It is therefore important that an information system must have a secure and rigorous way of authenticating a user's identity. This paper reviews the sources of literature on interactive design guidance for on-line user authentication, and then compares the actual practices of a purposefully selected sample of twelveWebsites against the recommendations from the literature. Alarmingly, the findings of this study are that manyWebsites have user authentication processes which contain basic design flaws that are potentially open to exploitation by Internet criminals.