The significance of the metaverse has been growing rapidly within the online realm. However, several challenges remain, including privacy, ethics, and governance. Extended reality (XR) devices used to access the metaverse are equipped with high-quality sensors that can collect large amounts of sensitive user data, including biometric data and spatial data. Such considerations raise major concerns about the extent and nature of user data that this massive platform could accumulate, the data collection awareness and transparency it will provide to its users, and the ethical nature of the informed user consent it will request. This research aims to document and analyze the privacy challenges that arise from a prevalent metaverse application, align them with the related literature, and present an initial set of ethical design suggestions that can mitigate these privacy challenges. To do so, a case study shapes and informs a set of ethical design suggestions. The user onboarding of a prev alent multi-user/remote working metaverse application, Meta Horizon Workrooms, was documented and modeled through a user journey modeling language, CJML. The walkthrough revealed certain challenges regarding data privacy awareness, such as long, legally worded privacy policies, a hard-to-use user interface that can affect privacy awareness, and ambiguous wording in data-collection notices. Several best practices regarding user privacy were examined to tackle these issues, and certain ethical design solutions (e.g., informed user interface, design privacy icons, anonymization, logging, revising all consent) are suggested.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly exposed to cyber risks. Some of the main reasons include budget constraints, the employees’ lack of cybersecurity awareness, cross-sectoral cyber risks, lack of security practices at organizational level, and so on. To equip SMEs with appropriate tools and guidelines that help mitigate their exposure to cyber risk, we must better understand the SMEs’ context and their needs. Thus, the contribution of this paper is a survey based on responses collected from 141 SMEs based in the UK, where the objective is to obtain information to better understand their level of cybersecurity awareness and practices they apply to protect against cyber risks. Our results indicate that although SMEs do apply some basic cybersecurity measures to mitigate cyber risks, there is a general lack of cybersecurity awareness and lack of processes and tools to improve cybersecurity practices. Our findings provide to the cybersecurity community a better understanding of the SME context in terms of cybersecurity awareness and cybersecurity practices, and may be used as a foundation to further develop appropriate tools and processes to strengthen the cybersecurity of SMEs.

Humans are the weak link in cybersecurity, hence, this paper considers the human factor in cybersecurity and how the customer journey approach can be used to increase cybersecurity awareness. The Customer Journey Modelling Language (CJML) is used to document and visualise a service process. We expand the CJML formalism to encompass cybersecurity and develop an easy-to-use web application as a supporting tool for training and awareness. We present the results from the usability test with ten persons in the target group and report on usability and feasibility. All participants managed to finish the test, and most participants indicated that the tool was easy to use. By using the tool, non-expert users can make user journey diagrams showing basic conformance in a short time without professional training. For the threat diagram, half of the users achieved full conformance. In conclusion, the tool can serve as low-threshold cybersecurity awareness training for SME employees. We discuss th e limitations and validity of the results and future work to improve the tool’s usability.

Abstract Although numerous methods for handling the technical aspects of developing domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) have been formalized, user needs and usability aspects are often addressed late in the development process and in an ad hoc manner. To this concern, this paper presents the development of the customer journey modeling language (CJML), a DSML for modeling service processes from the end-user’s perspective. Because CJML targets a wide and heterogeneous group of users, its usability can be challenging to plan and assess. This paper describes how an industry-relevant DSML was systematically improved by using a variety of user-centered design techniques in close collaboration with the target group, whose feedback was used to refine and evolve the syntax and semantics of CJML. We also suggest how a service-providing organization may benefit from adopting CJML as a unifying language for documentation purposes, compliance analysis, and service innovation. Finally, we distill what we learned into general lessons and methodological guidelines.

Although numerous methods have been formalized for handling the technical aspects of developing domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs), user needs and usability aspects are often addressed in ad hoc manners and late in the development process. Working in this context, this paper presents the development of the customer journey modeling language (CJML), a DSML for modeling service processes from the end-user's perspective. CJML targets a wide and heterogeneous group of users, making it especially challenging regarding usability. This paper describes how an industry-relevant DSML was systematically improved by using a variety of user-centered design techniques in close collaboration with the target group and how their feedback was used to refine and evolve the syntax and semantics of CJML. We also suggest how a service-providing organization may benefit from adopting CJML as a unifying language for documentation purposes, compliance analysis, and service innovation. Finally, we generalize the experience gained into lessons learned and methodological guidelines.

In this work, we examine the value that immersive technologies can bring to retailing through the retail practices they facilitate. To that end, a literature review is conducted resulting in the documentation of 28 augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications from 38 publications. After analyzing the applications’ functionality and use in retail, the following AR/VR-enabled retail practices emerged: branding and marketing; sales channel; after-sale customer service; virtual try-on; customer-as-designer; virtual training; and workflow management. A principal observation from the analysis is that current AR/VR applications are used mainly for customer-related innovation, with “branding and marketing” being a dominant practice. Simultaneously, some practices are available to serve organization-related and support-related innovation. Finally, it was observed that AR is a popular technology in the retail environment and of high practical value, being an ideal fit for the pu rchase journey and workflow management. However, VR is more difficult to implement in retail, as it can be more expensive and complicated to integrate with the sales channel. However, it can create strong emotional engagement due to high immersion and act as a useful tool for branding and training. Therefore, these two technologies in retail and their strengths can supplement each other, thereby creating promising innovation strategies when combined.