Web chat is becoming the primary customer contact channel in customer relationship management (CRM), and Question/Answer/Lookup (QAL) is the dominant communication pattern in CRM agent-to-customer chat. Text-based web chat for QAL has two main usability problems. Chat transcripts between agents and customers are not tightly integrated into agent-side applications, requiring customer service agents to re-enter customer typed data. Also, sensitive information posted in chat sessions in plain text raises security concerns. The addition of web form widgets to web chat not only solves both of these problems but also adds new usability benefits to QAL. Forms can be defined beforehand or, more flexibly, dynamically composed. Two preliminary user studies were conducted. An agent-side study showed that adding inline forms to web chat decreased overall QAL completion time by 47 percent and increased QAL accuracy by removing all potential human errors. A customer-side study showed that web chat with inline forms is intuitive to customers.

Security toolbars in a web browser show security-related information about a website to help users detect phishing attacks. Because the toolbars are designed for humans to use, they should be evaluated for usability -- that is, whether these toolbars really prevent users from being tricked into providing personal information. We conducted two user studies of three security toolbars and other browser security indicators and found them all ineffective at preventing phishing attacks. Even though subjects were asked to pay attention to the toolbar, many failed to look at it; others disregarded or explained away the toolbars' warnings if the content of web pages looked legitimate. We found that many subjects do not understand phishing attacks or realize how sophisticated such attacks can be.

We introduce a new anti-phishing solution, the Web Wallet. The Web Wallet is a browser sidebar which users can use to submit their sensitive information online. It detects phishing attacks by determining where users intend to submit their information and suggests an alternative safe path to their intended site if the current site does not match it. It integrates security questions into the user's workflow so that its protection cannot be ignored by the user. We conducted a user study on the Web Wallet prototype and found that the Web Wallet is a promising approach. In the study, it significantly decreased the spoof rate of typical phishing attacks from 63% to 7%, and it effectively prevented all phishing attacks as long as it was used. A majority of the subjects successfully learned to depend on the Web Wallet to submit their login information. However, the study also found that spoofing the Web Wallet interface itself was an effective attack. Moreover, it was not easy to completely stop all subjects from typing sensitive information directly into web forms.