A principled approach to transparency
As designers, it’s on us to represent what our teams are building and make it make sense to the user. But users often don’t need to know the ins and outs — so we have an extra task in figuring out what to focus on, and what’s best to keep out of the product.
I’m opening up a framework I’ve been using for the last 5+ years of my career when deciding what to be transparent about.
The framework
It’s simple. There are 3 questions:
- Does transparency add value to the user? Eg does it support people, empower them or inform them about something useful.
- Does it create risk? Eg brand, legal, adversarial, human rights.
- Will it be understood? Ie is it built on an existing mental model, and will it complement the product’s primary objective.
If we ask this question for every bit of transparency we’re exploring adding to a product experience, we’ll go a long way to making sure that product experiences remain useful, uncluttered and comprehensible.
If the product you’re building has multiple audiences, consider each question per audience group to make sure the decision scales.
And it’s rare that there’s no risk, but from here you can start a conversation about trade-offs and make a decision that takes the whole picture into account.
The benefits
Here’s a few:
- It speeds up decision-making
- It helps us be consistent
- It aids alignment
- It helps us move forward with principled product development even without perfect metrics
Where you might use it
I’ve applied it to product experiences like:
- Error messages
- Content takedown experiences
- Messaging about outages
- Changes in billing
- Explaining how personalisation works
Arguably, you might even want to apply it to things like press releases, speeches and internal presentations.
Using the framework to push for systemic change
Sometimes you might find that transparency reveals flaws in products and practices. This is a moment to step up as a content designer and push for systemic change — as we can’t write around a system that’s not defensible.
How to implement
I suggest thinking about this framework applies to your work—and kickstarting a conversation with your UX research, data science, product and eng partners about how it might fit your products needs.
If you’ve got interest, do a quick audit on what’s live and see what information might be superfluous—plus what transparency might be missing.
See my deep dive on the Meta content takedown experience for a closer view on an experience built on top of this framework.
