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Moving Beyond Passwords: Investigating the Effect of Digital Nudges on Passkey Adoption
Reittinger, Tobias
, Glas, Magdalena
and Pernul, Günther
(2026)
Moving Beyond Passwords: Investigating the Effect of Digital Nudges on Passkey Adoption.
In: CHI 2026: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 13 - 17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain.
Date of publication of this fulltext: 30 Apr 2026 05:14
Conference or workshop item
DOI to cite this document: 10.5283/epub.79370
Abstract
Passwords suffer from major usability hurdles that foster insecure practices and undermine cybersecurity. Passkeys were introduced to address these issues, however, adoption remains low. Digital nudges offer a promising way to accelerate passkey adoption, yet research lacks empirical insight about when to nudge and which nudge types and designs are most effective. We therefore employed a ...
Passwords suffer from major usability hurdles that foster insecure practices and undermine cybersecurity. Passkeys were introduced to address these issues, however, adoption remains low. Digital nudges offer a promising way to accelerate passkey adoption, yet research lacks empirical insight about when to nudge and which nudge types and designs are most effective. We therefore employed a mixed-methods approach to examine the impact of nudges on passkey adoption across five touchpoints in the digital user journey: During registration, login, account recovery, while in the settings menu, and during user activity. First, we conducted 15 expert interviews to identify candidate nudges and their design principles. We evaluate these nudges in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 3,680 participants on a commercial healthcare platform. Our results indicate that digital nudges can significantly increase passkey adoption when applied at the right touchpoints, encouraging users to move beyond passwords.
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Details
| Item type | Conference or workshop item (Paper) | ||||
| Publisher: | Association for Computing Machinery | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Place of Publication: | New York, NY, USA | ||||
| Other Series: | CHI '26 | ||||
| Date | 13 April 2026 | ||||
| Additional Information (public) | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems -> ISBN: 979-8-4007-2278-3 | ||||
| Institutions | Business, Economics and Information Systems > Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik Business, Economics and Information Systems > Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik > Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik I - Informationssysteme (Prof. Dr. Günther Pernul) Informatics and Data Science > Department Information Systems > Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik I - Informationssysteme (Prof. Dr. Günther Pernul) | ||||
| Identification Number |
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| Keywords | Authentication, Passkey, Password, FIDO2, Security, User Study, Field Study, Accounts | ||||
| Dewey Decimal Classification | 000 Computer science, information & general works > 004 Computer science | ||||
| Status | Published | ||||
| Refereed | Yes, this version has been refereed | ||||
| Created at the University of Regensburg | Yes | ||||
| URN of the UB Regensburg | urn:nbn:de:bvb:355-epub-793706 | ||||
| Item ID | 79370 |
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