Research

You can (or will) find a list of my research on this page. This includes published work, calls for theses projects and other opportunities to collaborate. This site is always work-in-progress. If you have questions, best just reach out to me.

About Me

I am a doctoral candidate at the Informatics (or Computer Science as Non-Germans would call it) department of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich and the Usable Security Group of the CODE institute at the University of the Bundeswehr. There I am researching on how we can build usable cryptocurrency wallets . Since end of 2020 I am pursuing a second doctoral degree in parallel at TUM's Chair for Strategy and Organization trying to figure out what makes entrepreneurship education work .

I am pursuing my research next to my work at the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), where I run the add-on study program (Honor's Degree) Technology Management. Together with my colleagues we aim to connect, educate and empower 25 motivated students – future innovators – each semester.

To find out more about me, feel free to have a look at my private website as well.

Publications

Below you find scientific papers I co-authored that are either published or in press. You also might want to check-out my Google Scholar profile.

Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Is It Better With Onboarding? Improving First-Time Cryptocurrency App Experiences

Michael Fröhlich, Charlotte Kobiella, Albrecht Schmidt, Florian Alt

Engaging first-time users of mobile apps is challenging. Onboarding task flows are designed to minimize the drop out of users. To this point, there is little scientific insight into how to design these task flows. We explore this question with a specific focus on financial applications, which pose a particularly high hurdle and require significant trust. We address this question by combining two approaches. We first conducted semi-structured interviews (n=16) exploring users' meaning-making when engaging with new mobile applications in general. We then prototyped and evaluated onboarding task flows (n=16) for two mobile cryptocurrency apps using the minimalist instruction framework. Our results suggest that well-designed onboarding processe...

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Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Don't Stop Me Now! Exploring Challenges Of First-Time Cryptocurrency Users

Michael Fröhlich, Maurizio Wagenhaus, Albrecht Schmidt,Florian Alt

Cryptocurrencies have increasingly gained interest in practice and research alike. Current research in the HCI community predominantly focuses on understanding the behavior of existing cryptocurrency users. Little attention has been given to early users and the challenges they encounter. However, understanding how interfaces of cryptocurrency systems support, impede, or even prevent adoption through new users is essential to develop better, more inclusive solutions. To close this gap, we conducted a user study (n=34) exploring challenges first-time cryptocurrency users face. Our analysis reveals that even popular wallets are not designed for novice users' needs, stopping them when they would be ready to engage with the technology. We identi...

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Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Don't lose your coin! Investigating Security Practices of Cryptocurrency Users

Michael Fröhlich, Felix Gutjahr, Florian Alt

In recent years, cryptocurrencies have increasingly gained interest. The underlying technology, Blockchain, shifts the responsibility for securing assets to the end-user and requires them to manage their (private) keys. Little attention has been given to how cryptocurrency users handle the challenges of key management in practice and how they select the tools to do so. To close this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=10). Our thematic analysis revealed prominent themes surrounding motivation, risk assessment, and coin management tool usage in practice. We found that the choice of tools is driven by how users assess and balance the key risks that can lead to loss: the risk of (1) human error, (2) betrayal, and (3) malicious atta...

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Theses

Are you a student at LMU or TUM ? Below you find open and ongoing master and bachelor theses I am supervising. I have supervised 10+ theses and enjoy moving research projects forward through collaboration. If you are interested in any of these topics – or have ideas on your own – feel free to reach out to me.

I am interested in how we can

build usable cryptocurrency wallets (coding experience needed)
evaluate the impact of entrepreneurship education
figure out what factors excellent entrepreneurship courses have in common
understand whether grit is predictive for startup success

open

Development of a short scale for measuring Entrepreneurial-Self-Efficacy (ESE)

Being able to reliably measure individuals' believes in their capability to succeed as entrepreneurs is critical to evaluate entrepreneurship training and education. The goal of this thesis is to develop and validate a short scale for measuring Entrepreneurial-Self-Efficacy as a multidimensional concept.

open

What impact does entrepreneurship education have on career and startup success?

Does entrepreneurship education work? The impact of entrepreneurship education is rarely measured by direct entrepreneurial outcomes. We have a unique dataset that allows us to do just that. The goal of this thesis is to quantify the impact of entrepreneurship education on career and startup success by analyzing LinkedIn and Crunchbase profiles of past participants of an entrepreneurship program.

open

Is grit predictive for entrepreneurial success?

When we think of the archetype of a successful entrepreneur, we can easily imagine someone who relentlessly pursues their vision and overcomes any adversities to succeed. Grit is a character trait that comes close to this. The goal of this thesis is to to examine the relationship of grit in the entrepreneurial context. Is being gritty correlated with startup success?

open

Literature review: Advances in blockchain interaction design

While cryptocurrency prices are soaring, blockchain applications face one particular challenge for adoption: End-users perceive their usability as poor. The goal of this thesis is to systematically review the blockchain interaction design literature and examine which issues could be addressed by research and which remain to be solved.

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