Human Factors: feeling safe

Active contributions to safety and security are always welcome, in this field ICTs can play a significant role. If we consider cybersecurity this was the basic condition in order to implement any kind of e-Service from eHealth to e-Biz; when the European Commission launched the Information Society the prerequisite was to ensure cybersecurity. ICTs can dramatically improve both safety and security. Off course if on one side technological solution can improve physically safety and security on the other side, equally important, is the ”human factor”, this time partially due to the usual ergonomic aspects more significantly due to the feeling of safety and security that is generated by the solutions. This side of the “counter measures” is even more relevant than the technological side. Let’s consider the case of eBiz, without the feeling of “security” it could be very difficult to convince citizens to buy and sell items on line. If we refer to the actual risks due to terroristic attacks again the ability to generate a feeling of safety and security in citizens is even more relevant than the real safety and security measures. This specific need was many times the key element in interaction design. There are different examples of interaction design; time ago when the first public phones started to accept credit cards France Telecom released a public phone with a special slot to put in the credit card, in doing this the card was 100% inside the phone disappearing to the eyes of the card holder. This type of public phone didn’t succeed because citizens were concerned to lose the card inside the phone in case of malfunction. In order to solve the “human” lack of trust in the machinery designers decided to modify the credit card slot leaving more than 50% of the card outside the phone thus providing the feeling of “trust”.