Increasing Accountability through the User Interface Design Artifacts: A New Approach to Addressing the Problem of Access-Policy Violations

MIS Quarterly, vol. 39(2), pp. 345–366.

65 Pages Posted: 14 Jan 2015 Last revised: 8 Jan 2018

See all articles by Anthony Vance

Anthony Vance

Brigham Young University - Department of Information Systems

Paul Benjamin Lowry

Virginia Tech - Pamplin College of Business

Dennis L. Eggett

Brigham Young University - Center for Statistical Consultation and Collaborative Research

Date Written: January 13, 2015

Abstract

Access-policy violations are a growing problem with substantial costs for organizations. Although training programs and sanctions have been suggested as a means of reducing these violations, evidence shows these persist. It is thus imperative to identify additional ways to reduce access-policy violations, especially for ubiquitous broad-access systems. We use accountability theory to develop four user-interface (UI) design artifacts that raise users’ accountability perceptions within systems and in turn decrease access-policy violations. To test our model, we uniquely applied the scenario-based factorial survey method to various graphical manipulations of a records system containing sensitive information at a large organization with over 300 end-users who use the system daily. We show that the UI design artifacts corresponding to four submanipulations of accountability can raise accountability and reduce access policy-violation intentions. Our findings have several theoretical, practice, and design-science implications for increasing accountability using UI design. Moreover, we are the first to extend the scenario-based factorial survey method to test design artifacts. This method provides the ability to use more design manipulations and to test with fewer users than is required in traditional experimentation and research on human-computer interaction. We also provide bootstrapping tests of mediation and moderation and demonstrate how to analyze fixed and random effects within the factorial survey method optimally.

Keywords: Accountability theory, identifiability, expectation of evaluation, awareness of monitoring, social presence, factorial survey method, user-interface design, information security policy violations, unauthorized access, graphical vignettes, mediation, moderation, design science

Suggested Citation

Vance, Anthony and Lowry, Paul Benjamin and Eggett, Dennis L., Increasing Accountability through the User Interface Design Artifacts: A New Approach to Addressing the Problem of Access-Policy Violations (January 13, 2015). MIS Quarterly, vol. 39(2), pp. 345–366., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2549000

Anthony Vance

Brigham Young University - Department of Information Systems ( email )

510 Tanner Building
Marriott School
Provo, UT 84602
United States

Paul Benjamin Lowry (Contact Author)

Virginia Tech - Pamplin College of Business ( email )

1016 Pamplin Hall
Blacksburg, VA 24061
United States

Dennis L. Eggett

Brigham Young University - Center for Statistical Consultation and Collaborative Research ( email )

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
1,131
Abstract Views
3,467
Rank
35,295
PlumX Metrics