Deceptive techniques known as dark patterns specifically target online users. Children are particularly vulnerable as they might lack the skills to recognise and resist these deceptive attempts. To be effective, interventions to forewarn and forearm should build on a comprehensive understanding of children’s existing mental models. To this end, we carried out a study with 11- to 12-year-old Scottish children to reveal their mental models of dark patterns. They were acutely aware of online deception, referring to deployers as being ‘up to no good.’ Yet, they were overly vigilant and construed worst-case outcomes, with even a benign warning triggering suspicion. We recommend that rather than focusing on specific instances of dark patterns in awareness raising, interventions should prioritise improving children’s understanding of the characteristics of, and the motivations behind, deceptive online techniques. By so doing, we can help them to develop a more robust defence against these deceptive practices.

Digital motivation refers to the use of software-based solutions to change, enhance, or maintain people’s attitude and behaviour towards specific tasks, policies, and regulations. Gamification, persuasive technology, and entertainment computing are example strands of such a paradigm. Digital motivation has unique properties which necessitate careful consideration of its analysis design methods. This stems from the strong human factor involvement, and if it is not implemented effectively, it can result in digital motivation being perceived negatively or leading to reduced motivation. The emerging literature on the topic includes approaches for creating digital motivation solutions. However, their primary focus is on specifying its operation, for example, the design of feedback, rewards and levels. In this paper, we propose a novel modelling language which enables capturing digital motivation as an integral part of the organisational and social structure of a business, captured via goal models. We also demonstrate how modelling of motivational techniques at this level, the goal level, enables a more powerful analysis that informs the introduction, design and management of digital motivation. Finally, we evaluate the language and its analysis using different perspectives and quality measures and report the results.

This paper will discuss our observations gained from teaching psychological principles and methods to undergraduate and postgraduate cybersecurity students. We will draw on and extend our previous work encouraging the teaching of psychology in computing and cybersecurity education. We pay special attention to the consideration of characteristics of cybersecurity students in terms of teaching psychology in a way that will be accessible and engaging. We then discuss the development and use of an online training tool which draws on psychology to help educators and companies to raise awareness of cybersecurity risks in students and employees. Finally, we offer some practical suggestions to incorporate psychology into the cybersecurity curriculum.

Software-based motivation refers to the use of technology to enhance the engagement and efficiency of people in performing tasks and following a certain behaviour. Instances of such paradigm include gamification, persuasive technology and entertainment computing. Despite its potential, an ad-hoc introduction of software-based motivation to a business environment may lead to detrimental effects such as creating pressure and tension, and also reducing quality and authenticity. Hence, we advocate the need for a systematic engineering process to develop software solutions for motivation requirements. One of the challenges is in the high diversity in users' perception and acceptance of motivation strategies and their software-based incarnations. In this paper, we propose the use of personas as an intermediate step which increases efficiency in the engineering process for both engineers and users. We conduct an empirical research and identify elements which describe people with regard to their perception and preferences towards software-based motivational techniques and create a set of exemplary personas to aid the engineering process. We also present guidelines and challenges related to using persona-based engineering methods for software-based motivation.

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm which utilises the power of the crowd in contributing information and solving problems. Crowdsourcing can support requirements elicitation, especially for systems used by a wide range of users and working in a dynamic context where requirements evolve regularly. For such systems, traditional elicitation methods are typically costly and limited in catering for the high diversity, scale and volatility of requirements. In this paper, we advocate the use of crowdsourcing for requirements elicitation and investigate ways to configure crowdsourcing to improve the quality of elicited requirements. To confirm and enhance our argument, we follow an empirical approach starting with two focus groups involving 14 participants, users and developers, followed by an online expert survey involving 34 participants from the Requirements Engineering community. We discuss our findings and present a set of challenges of applying crowdsourcing to aid requirements engineering with a focus on the elicitation stage.

Crowdsourcing is an emerging business model where tasks are accomplished by the general public; the crowd. Crowdsourcing has been used in a variety of disciplines, including information systems development, marketing and operationalization. It has been shown to be a successful model in recommendation systems, multimedia design and evaluation, database design, and search engine evaluation. Despite the increasing academic and industrial interest in crowdsourcing, there is still a high degree of diversity in the interpretation and the application of the concept. This paper analyses the literature and deduces a taxonomy of crowdsourcing. The taxonomy is meant to represent the different configurations of crowdsourcing in its main four pillars: the crowdsourcer, the crowd, the crowdsourced task and the crowdsourcing platform. Our outcome will help researchers and developers as a reference model to concretely and precisely state their particular interpretation and configuration of crowdsourcing.

This paper reports an evaluation of students' experiences when seminars were conducted asynchronously using a text-based computer-conferencing system. The primary aim was for students to experience and consider the effects of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) on inter-personal interaction. Specifically, students were encouraged to consider how an understanding of these effects could be used to inform the design and implementation of CMC systems. Students were also encouraged to think about the differences between users in communication skills and preferences and to consider how these impact on the use and perception of CMC. The results showed that students experienced some of the effects of CMC (e.g. flaming and more balanced participation) and 79% indicated that participating in the seminars had helped them to understand the potential impact of CMC on interaction. Also, individual communication differences significantly correlated with perceptions of the seminars. For example, extrovert students perceived the seminar discussions as less satisfying and less enjoyable than traditional seminars, while self-conscious students perceived the seminars as more involving. Some recommendations are suggested for conducting future computer-mediated seminars and for further research.