Creating products with the user’s privacy at the heart of everything
How not just to deliver the best experiences, but also help users feel a sense of safety, control and ownership.
Users have a fundamental right to their privacy as much in the digital space as they do their physical day to day lives. This sounds obvious, but many people don’t realize how easily companies can slip up on the issue.
Our digital lives have changed our sense of security.
Take my physical bank cards for example. I may own one or many, but nobody I meet physically can see or obtain the details from these cards.
The card and its details are safely secure, stored in my wallet which sits in my pocket.
It would be very hard for anyone to get my bank details and perform a money transfer without me giving them the details via word of mouth or showing them the card. I have complete control and security of my sensitive financial information in the physical space (If there is no digital trace of it).
The same applies to details about myself. Unless I tell someone my name, my age, where I live or what I do for a living, nobody has a way of knowing any of that information about me, unless they get that information from someone I have previously told before, but even then it would be quite hard to actually prove the information is true. It’s just hearsay and based on trust.
We now live in a world where all of my sensitive financial information is recorded digitally, and as soon as I send money to friends and businesses, they get to keep a record of that information, which they now obtain forever infinity. The more often I share these details, the more companies and individuals have access to personal information about me, and on often occasions it’s possible to get all that information without my involvement or even my knowledge. What is potentially scary about that is what comes next. I have no knowledge or control with what other individuals do with my personal data.
People’s eyes opened recently, and are a lot wearier.
A well-known breach of user’s trust and malicious use of users data was the whole string of events that unfolded from the whistleblowing of Cambridge Analytica.
“If you joined the app, I would not just see your Facebook profile, I would see all of the Facebook profiles of everybody that you’re friends with. “
“If you were a friend of someone who used the app, you would have no idea that I had just pulled all of your data.”
The world’s eyes being opened to the Cambridge Analytica incident is one that has changed people’s perception of how easily people trust an app or company, and how carefully they look into whether you are being transparent with them or if you are sneakily trying to hide certain elements from their knowledge.
As designers, it is our fundamental responsibility to design products that are transparent, user-friendly and as educational as possible whilst also making sure not to overwhelm the user with information, confusing them in the process.
Some companies are making privacy their core message.
Companies like Apple have taken user’s privacy very seriously and are making it a fundamental part of their product strategy and benefit for users.
Below is a video introducing the new credit card they have released, specifically revolved around privacy.
The top features they focused on:
- No details on the physical card except your number. If you lose the card, or it’s stolen, no stress.
- It won’t let Apple know where its customers have shopped, how much they paid, or what they bought. ( — Apple)
- Goldman Sachs will use customers’ personal data to operate the card, but won’t share or sell it to third parties for marketing or advertising.
- “Features like spend tracking and categorization all happen using on-device intelligence, not on Apple servers,” — Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay.
Articles like this are great to hear about a high-level approach to design thinking in businesses, but it’s also great to get into the finer details to understand a better picture of how to put it into practice.
Below are a few tips on how you can design with a user’s privacy in mind:
Get creative with gaining insights aside from analytics.
Analytics and data only tell you one side of the story, you need to understand the motivations, frustrations and anxieties of your users. Here are some things you could do to achieve understand your users better.
Build a community
- If you’ve built your product well enough, hopefully, you’ll have super users or even users who are very passionate about what you are working on. Build a community to help benefit from this. This will help users feel as though their voice is being heard, but you’ll have a better understanding of what will work before you release it.
At Yoti we have built Yoti Community to give users a chance to come in and help us test and shed ideas on our products and be a part of our journey. - You could do this yourselves with a publically open product priorities board that people can vote on, using Trello, or have a fully functioning forum like Monzo utilize to build their products. Something as simple as paying close attention to the comments on your app store, play store, and even social media sites are very important too.
Use every physical interaction as a chance to learn
- Not all insights need to come from online. Where possible use as much chance to meet your potential users in person and in context to understand their anxieties, concerns, moments of delight and also ideas for enhancing products you are offering, or about to release.
At Yoti, we have brought our design team along to Festivals where we provided age checking for people so they could get bands to show at the bars to be able to buy alcohol. We’ve had teams speaking with university students while offering out Citizen Cards, and event piloting age estimation, taking photos of people’s faces with their initiated consent at London malls to gather insights into how the technology made them feel and what questions they had at each point of the process.
Have customer support as accessible as you can in your product
- At points in acquisition flows. It’s not a distraction to their goal, it’s assistance to help them achieve it.
- You may have a limited support team and would struggle to keep up with the influx of communication, but there is nothing more deafening than a company that doesn’t even give an option for users to contact a company, or make it downright impossible to find out how to contact them.
Aside from the community and insights aspect, here are some visual design patterns to consider:
Layering information
- Always make sure the primary CTA reflects the user’s main goal.
- Where possible, give them a secondary option. Don’t force users to do something they don’t necessarily need to.
- Through interviews and testing, you’ll find some users want to know extra information. These may not be anxieties, but it helps to be transparent and inform the user about how a feature works. It makes them feel empowered
- In the extra page, you can add further links to let users read in even more depth if they choose. Layer the information and don’t let users think you are withholding information from them.
Speaking colloquially
- When talking about something quite heavily technical, with a process that relies on industry buzz words like ai, data mapping etc, it’s important to avoid all that jargon and speak to your users in common speech so that users don’t get confused, or feel a sense of hesitation.
Address possible anxieties a user may have at certain points
- People always have doubts at certain points of the flow in your product. Do your best to alleviate those anxieties by giving them piece of mind at each point in the journey.
Some final points to think on
Thanks to GDPR, companies are being forced to give users a lot more power in terms of how we handle their data. But users may love your company even more if you ask for their consent for places where you could just inform them of what’s happening.
It gives them a sense of control and builds their trust that you will always be open with them, and in turn builds their liking towards the companies brand and message.
Taken from a blog from Jenny Wagner: While constantly using your product, in the back of your user’s minds, they are constantly asking themselves, ‘Does this company have my best interests at heart? Does this company have the ability to keep my data safe?’
Don’t take their trust for granted, it can be lost in one single new feature release if the feature or the way it works is deemed suspicious in their eyes.
Privacy is one thing, but security is usually a thought straight after, if not before. People want to feel safe and confident that your technology has done everything in its power to prevent a breach, leak, attack or anything that will result in their information being stolen.
Privacy and security is quite a complex subject. Feel free to comment your thoughts or share this article to spread the message.
