How to fix GDPR disaster of endless cookie consents
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That’s exactly how GDPR could be described when I evaluate its impact on aesthetics of the web today.
Well, the benefits of making our data a tad more ours and our privacy a little more protected are unquestionable and have been discussed in details by many. However, GDPR implementation in flesh and code is ugly, counter intuitive and harmful for the perfect user experience we put so much into, and fail to deliver at times. GDPR fail comes at a scale, and here’s how it could have been avoided at almost no additional cost.
Take a look at the most elegant design-less cookie consent popup ever created:
Design-less means we simply don’t need to design any sort of technical consent. Should we ask for one, it’s more than enough to utilise native user’s environment which includes only browser in case with getting cookies permissions, obtaining user’s location, etc.
Slightly tweaking all browsers to help websites be compliant with GDPR is relatively easy. Tweaking the whole web is a challenge we failed so far.
Can anyone estimate how many resources companies and individuals have put into making their products and services compliant with GDPR through getting that OK/Accept button clicked on each and every site? Rest assured, it’s an insane amount of hours and dollars that designers and developers could have spent on making the web better. We wasted it instead, and it’s a bummer.
What’s even more frustrating is that quite a hefty chunk of web appears to be locked by mediocre popups and standalone consent pages covering navigation elements, content itself, calls to action, ads, contact details — all those things we actually use the web for. Honestly, I don’t feel that much protected here, I feel disconnected.
Summing up, GDPR story is another great example of enforced positive changes that didn’t work out quite well without plugging industry professionals into decision making process right from the start. GDPR team clearly missed those who are able to think about long term consequences, and those who design with perfect user experience in mind. My advice is to hire the best talents for the big changes.
© Cookie icon by Elves Sousa from the Noun Project
