Tux Machines

Overhaul Enncryption Support in Kontact

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 07, 2022

=> Fedora / Red Hat / IBM Leftovers | HEVC uAPI mainlined

=> ↺ Enncryption Support in Kontact

For a long time I have been fixing issues behind the scenes to support Autocrypt and fixing bugs around encryption.

But the best crypto support does not help if it is too complicated for users to use the system. PGP is complex and a lot of things can go wrong, so the UI should support the user to find solutions, if things are going the wrong way. For me it was obvious that I cannot do this on my own and found Eileen Wagner a UX designer who is experienced in crypto UX. It was a lot fun to work together with Eileen to improve the UX in Kontact ;)

It soon became obvious that the part that needs an overhaul is mostly sending. There is a lot that happens AFTER you press send. You may be faced with information that the keys are not good enough, or that a used key is near expiry. So we tried to improve the UX so that these issues will bubble up earlier so you can fix the issues before pressing send.

At least for me, it is often that I concentrate in order to finish a message before I need to go, and then press send in a hurry. So all dialogs and warnings are facing me while I'm in a hurry and I just want them to disappear. If instead, I know of those things in advance, I will have time to ask for a new key or search for the correct key for a particular recipient.

Here you see a sample of creating a message to several recipients after our improvements.

Read on

=> ↺ Read on

=> gemini.tuxmachines.org