“It’s Definitely New and Different…It’s Really Engaging”: Understanding the Power of Storytelling Towards Secure Password Creation

Abstract

There is a dearth in existing literature to attain systematic understanding of leveraging digital storytelling in security designs. As we begin to address this gap, we focused on user authentication where the existing password composition policies and password meters often fail to help users around creating a strong and memorable password. To this end, we conducted a lab study with 19 participants, where we updated our initial designs in an iterative manner based on their feedback. We then conducted a between-subject online study with 104 participants over Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate our designs. We found that all of our designs received positive ratings from participants in terms of how they felt confident, and capable in password creation upon interacting with our design. Taken together, the findings from our studies unpacked users’ perceptions and preferences in using storytelling around password creation, where we provide guideline for future research in these directions.