Currently I am working on the following projects:
I'm sure many are aware of the privacy issues concerning Facebook as the topic is in the media a lot right now. My research team is also aware of such concerns and we know that Facebook already has a mechanism in place to better customize privacy settings - friend lists. However, it isn't obvious how to create or even edit a friend list.
Therefore we want to design a more usable interface that makes it easier to do so. But, before we can do this, we need to research how people group their friends. It will give us a better idea of how to design the interface. This summer I am working on a project where we will conduct a user study that will investigate how people group their friends on Faceook.
Recently Carnegie Mellon University made everyone change their passwords to one with much stricter requirements. However, a study was done on campus which showed that many people are upset about the mandatory change.
At the CUPS lab, we are researching if it would be better to have shorter passwords with very strict requirements or longer passwords which may not be as easy to guess and not have as many restrictions. A user study will be done using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service that will answer the question - when does a strong sense of privacy diminish user satisfaction.