Heidi Trost: Human Centered Security

18 snips

Mar 25, 2025

Heidi Trost, a UX leader and author of "Human-Centered Security," dives into the complexities of designing secure user experiences. She discusses the common frustrations users face with security protocols, like pesky captchas and complicated login recovery systems. Heidi emphasizes the need for human-centered design in enhancing security and trust. She also highlights the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration and innovative frameworks, such as threat modeling, to create user-friendly solutions that prioritize safety without sacrificing usability.

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ANECDOTE

Apple Password Reset Struggle

Aaron Walter struggled to change his Apple ID password, despite multiple attempts.
This highlights the difficulty of security UX, even for design-focused companies.

INSIGHT

Security UX Complexity

Designing secure UX is complex due to the interplay between users, security measures, and threat actors.
Each player influences the others, creating a dynamic, ever-changing challenge.

ADVICE

Security Across User Journey

Consider security at every stage of the user journey, from marketing to product use.
Onboarding is crucial, as users make key security decisions that have long-term impacts.

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Designing a good security experience is hard. Every time we run into one of those security captchas that requires you to “identify all the motorcycles” in the tiled images, we want to give up and surrender to our robot overlords…or throw our laptop out the window.

Our guest today, Heidi Trost, just published a book called Human-Centered Security: How to Design Systems That Are Both Safe and Usable. In the book, Heidi aims to help people who are “tired of hearing things like ‘humans are the weakest link’ and instead want to focus on designing more secure, more resilient systems.”

In our conversation, we spoke with Heidi about the metrics we can use to measure the quality of the security experience, why the login/password recovery is so broken—even for companies that are good at UX design—and some ways to approach user testing for security.

Bio

Heidi Trost is a UX leader who helps cross-disciplinary teams improve the security user experience. With a background in UX research, Heidi does this by helping teams better understand the people they are designing for, as well as the security threats that may impact people and systems negatively. Heidi is also the host of the podcast, Human-Centered Security, where she interviews security experts and people who design for the security user experience.

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