advances in usability for cryptography/authentication I'm wondering if there have been any recent advances (say, the past 5-10 years) in human usability for cryptography and/or authentication? 

By that I mean something that makes it easier for an average person to make use of the benefits of cryptography. It strikes me that although we have all these great algorithms for encryption and hashing, and they have widespread use in machine-to-machine communication, it's still hard for us humans to use cryptography, because there's an impedance-mismatch between these methods and the way most people's brains work.

(The only one I can think of is OpenID or things like it, namely a way of decoupling the authentication process from the point-of-use without compromising security, so that one authentication method can be used for many end uses.)

Some examples in case this doesn't make sense:

I was just reading the O'Reilly book "Web Security, Privacy, and Commerce" (2002 edition), and was reading about PGP, and wondering why after 20 years, it or something like it is still not in widespread use.

I'm also wondering why the allegedly secure websites (financial/healthcare) that I use, still use password access and still have "security questions" in case I forget my password, where the security questions aren't very secure.
This is an active area of research. There have been attempts at creating usable security tools and lots of user studies of existing tools (typically with critical results).

A good anthology for work in this area (a few years old now) is Security and Usability edited by Lorrie Cranor and Simson Garfinkel.

There is also a workshop every year called Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) with lots of papers. However the best usable security papers tend to appear at the top security conferences (Oakland, Usenix Security, and CCS).