A Usability Analysis of Microsoft Windows Vista’s Firewall

The usability of personal firewalls has not received a significant amount of attention in the literature. However, it is essential that these firewalls - which are used by the lay end-user to protect his/her computer from malicious programs on the internet - be usable as well as secure, and that one concept lead to the other seamlessly. Here, we report on the results of a usability analysis of Windows Vista's firewall. Our heuristic evaluation of the firewall (based on standard usability guidelines and carefully extracted benchmarks) has thrown up many areas of improvement. In this term project, we propose a medium-fidelity prototype to address some of these issues, perform lab experiments and user studies involving this prototype, and based on the results of our rigorous field work, and suggest final modifications leading to a high-fidelity prototype.