"How can users be motivated to consider offered products, services or information available on a website?". Nowadays, people's attention span is short, so during the brief period people stay on a website, they need to be motivated as quick as possible. Website visitors are motivated to varying degrees ranging from very low to extremely high. Thus, the effort needed for them, to have their motivation increads also varies accordingly. Since not all people are motivated by the same things, one must use different nudges. Out of the situations mentioned above the following problem arises: How and in what way can we use nudges to motivate people from different motivational levels to inform themselves about the topic of cybersecurity?
We are tasked to create a web solution that allows an SME to answer the following question for themselves: "How risky is it for businesses like mine, in my area at this time?". The solution should contain the following features:
SMEs are frequently falling victim to cyberattacks and while many SMEs are aware of the risk that cyberattacks pose, a lot of them don't know whether they're personally at risk, and if they are how to take measures against those risks. Because of that many SMEs are need some form of motivation to invest the necessary resources to bolster their cybersecurity.
During the tests, it turned out that we were only able to comment very cautiously because the time we had for researching and reading into the very complex topic was minimal, and the number of test subjects for this topic was minimal. But nevertheless, we would like to note a few things. First, the positioning of each nudge can leave a significant impression, especially if that impression is negative. We noticed this, especially with the positioning of the buttons. On some of our test person, the page already seemed very unserious at first glance, motivation levels across. In addition, the effect of the nudges on the test subjects we had is very general. This means that it is difficult to determine whether the specific nudge has a stronger or weaker effect on the persona with the motivation level of integrated regulation than on the motivation level of externally regulated behavior. All our test subjects expressed roughly the same opinion about this. Most of the findings, such as the placement of the fear nudge, came out the same for both motivation levels. The nudge, which should trigger a certain level of fear in the user, seemed to be very important to both types of subjects, and they wanted it to be first in the prototype. Our suspicion that this might deter the more motivated subjects was refuted here. Furthermore, we noticed that the subliminal priming had been too weak in our case, but it would have made a different impression even in this case.
Project duration: 17. September 2021 - 21. Januar 2022
Total effort: 360 hours
Teamsize: 2 person
IIT GEIGER
cyber-geiger.euElias Mjoen
Timon Keller
Prof. Dr. Samuel Fricker, samuel.fricker@fhnw.ch
Louis Baumgartner, louis.baumgartner@fhnw.ch
