Usability Study of Windows Vista’s Firewall

Windows Vista is shipped with a built-in personal firewall. The firewall has lots of new features over its predecessor, XP’s firewall. But, previous studies showed that Vista’s firewall have a set of usability problems. The goal of this paper is to address the lack of a complete and validated prototype of improved Vista’s firewall interface. By providing a high-fidelity prototype that could be evaluated against Vista’s firewall, the weaknesses of current interface can be shown with enough evidence, and suggested improvements could be used to fix the usability flaws in the Vista’s firewall.