Designing for Privacy
The future of experiences
Privacy comes at a price. It’s not free.
Giving up a piece of your privacy either it’s a credit card number or your location in order to use some feature in an app is all about understanding value. How many of you really know why any app wants to use your location? (Uber, Facebook, Instagram)
Why do you think things like Facebook/Instagram/Twitter are free to use? (I think we all know why but we forget quickly, even I’m a victim of that.)
As these invisible experiences start to consume our lives we as consumers will need to start to fully understand the value behind giving up some of our most intimate information.
The 3 keys; Convenience, Time and Value.
As an example we may start to see some of these impressive wearable devices become free and we’ll see tons of people start gobbling them up. All this without fully understanding what the real cost of using this free device really is. As the old saying goes nothing in life is free. This speaks true to these new wearables devices. Take for example Oscar Insurance, a New York-based startup, now sends members a free Misfit wristband to track their steps, and whenever someone reaches a daily goal for a certain number of steps, the company pays them. Sounds like a good idea right. Just remember the personal information you supply to this wearable devices/services is 100x more valuable then any hardware/software cost and these companies selling them know it. As designers and creators of these experiences we’ll need to really start designing for privacy and convey the true meaning of strapping a device to your body to simple track your steps, or at least make the user think that.
As consumer’s become more savvy and aware of this personal data collection these experiences designed will become more and more important. How we inform a consumer what’s happening is going be what sells a product/service. It comes back to what the word experience really means, its how you make the person feel.
Here are a few more stories on Designing for Privacy.
I’m the VP of Experience Innovation at Universal Mind — A Digital Agency. You can follow me on twitter at @merhl.
