When Interactive Graphic Storytelling Fails
This study addresses the problem of effectively educating professionals about cybersecurity threats, finding that interactive graphic storytelling, in this specific context, was not an effective solution for employees of a major industrial company.
This paper explored using interactive graphic vignettes to educate professionals about cybersecurity threats, hypothesizing they would be an effective inoculation method. However, an evaluation with 20 volunteers at a capture-the-flag event revealed that most participants found the images distracting and preferred text-only material, indicating the comics did not fulfill the study's requirements.
Many people are unaware of the digital dangers that lie around each cyber-corner. Teaching people how to recognize dangerous situations is crucial, especially for those who work on or with computers. We postulated that interactive graphic vignettes could be a great way to expose professionals to dangerous situations and demonstrate the effects of their choices in these situations. In that way, we aimed to inoculate employees against cybersecurity threats. We used the Comic-BEE platform to create interactive security awareness vignettes and evaluated for how employees of a major industrial company perceived them. For analysing the potential of these comics, we ran an evaluation study as part of a capture-the-flag (CTF) event, an interactive exercise for hacking vulnerable software. We evaluated whether the comics fulfilled our requirements based on the responses of the participants. We showed the comics, on various cybersecurity concepts, to 20 volunteers. In the context of a CTF event, our requirements were not fulfilled. Most participants considered the images distracting, stating a preference for text-only material.