We are not only trying to get young people more acclimated to practicing cyber hygiene but to also be intrigued about its hygiene practices.
Cybersecurity is a complex realm to work in. For individuals who do not work in the technology world, cybersecurity is one of those topics that is not discussed. This is due to various reasons ranging from difficulty of comprehending the material, our cyberspace complexity, and mostly a lack of . Because of these dilemmas there has been an increase in unprotected data, a decrease in cyber hygiene and a decrease in young people who do not find cyber hygiene practices interesting or fun. Not only do we want people to become more involved in cybersecurity, but we also want them to be eager and interested to maintain cyber hygiene practices.
During our design process, our team identified potential how might we questions before arriving at “How might we make cybersecurity fun and interesting?” When going through our interview rounds a common theme was that users simply did not care or feel the need to apply cyber hygiene measures when navigating the internet. When working through our problem we noticed the community who faced the most risk were teenagers to young adults. We came to this conclusion because the group that spends the most time on the internet and using mobile phones are 16 to 24-year-olds this group subset also leads the treads that later trickle down to everyone else. The older generations don't use the phone to the extent that younger generations do plus they are already wary of the information that they put online because growing up they were used to everything being physical. The disconnect between the younger and older generations led us to decide which group we should cater our product to.
To determine where the lack of cyber hygiene was stemming from and the cause of this affect our team started out with a broader spectrum. Meaning when we first conducted interviews, we didn't have a specific age range in mind. But, after speaking with various demographics we soon realized that the younger generation finds cyber hygiene practices demanding, uninteresting, and unnecessary. And the older generation strays away from technology because of its complexity and fear of providing sensitive information.
It was a great opportunity to see other's perspectives and thoughts on cyber hygiene and its practices. Conducting these interviews and speaking with individuals allowed us to not only see the common problem; but, to think of a solution that can start with the younger generation and then have the young people influence the older generation to be more involved with cybersecurity.