Title: A strategy for increasing user acceptance of authentication systems: insights from an empirical study of user preferences and performance

Authors: A.A. Ozok, S. Holden

Addresses: Department of Information Systems, UMBC, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA. ' SRA Touchstone Consulting Group, 1920 N Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036, USA

Abstract: A lack of user acceptance of authentication systems costs organisations money and sometimes deters users from doing their jobs. Despite recent research on the usability of authentication systems, there is little empirical or theoretical understanding of user preferences in authentication systems. This research, based on a comparison of user preferences and performance between alphanumeric passwords and the graphical password, PassFaces™, identifies two user preference factors for authentication systems. There were no significant user performance differences between the two systems. A rank-ordered list of user preferences for usability and security in authentication systems offers organisations potential criteria for evaluating authentication systems.

Keywords: authentication systems; graphical authentication; organisational strategy; performance; user acceptance; user preferences.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBSR.2008.020763

International Journal of Business and Systems Research, 2008 Vol.2 No.4, pp.343 - 364

Published online: 14 Oct 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article