Designing the Privacy User Experience

In March 2011, Google was served with a two decade future audit of the company’s privacy practices, by the US Federal Trade Commission, for violation of user privacy with the Buzz product. The FTC cited poor user experience in providing users with privacy controls. Analysts believe this strong verdict is a warning to other companies that would willingly or unwillingly violate online user privacy.

Designing privacy is a key challenge. Privacy concerns are the #1 show stopper in ecommerce, are mandatory in social networking or social software design and are becoming a brand identity issue into the next decade. Do users feel your company protects their privacy with your site or product experience?

Topic: 
User Privacy, Privacy User Experience strategy, UI Design, perception of privacy, Designing privacy systems, social networking privacy, social software

Protecting user privacy is not something that just happens as part of the design process. Instead privacy requires a specific user experience strategy that accounts for and factors it into the design approach. Designing for privacy is as important as designing for customer conversion. This has to do with the fact that conversion and even adoption are tied directly to perception of privacy.

In Europe consumer privacy is much more heavily regulated than the United States, which is why we don’t hear about European companies violating privacy. In the US, market leaders Google and Facebook have attempted to take advantage of lax privacy rights protection and push a culture of informal privacy adherence. This has failed, as witnessed by the Facebook founder’s retraction of his statement that we had entered the privacy lax era.

The many attempts by Google and Facebook to favor inadvertent sharing and cookie tracking (attempts to loosen privacy) have led a shoddy overall experience for users, the most notable symptom (and the butt of many a cartoon) includes being unaware of what one is actually sharing. Both Google and Facebook have taken public beatings for their violations of privacy and both struggle in practice to guard privacy by design.

In this seminar, we look at how to design a web service, social networking site or social application with privacy built in from the start. What is the best way to notify users of their privacy without having them read a press release or legal footer text? How should you rework an existing design or application to be more privacy-compliant?

This seminar we will explore important user interface design strategy and tactics that will help you design an intentional and deliberate privacy user experience. We will follow research based guidelines and proven tactics for improving and strengthening perception of privacy. You will learn how to apply privacy user experience (UX) to an existing design as well as how to approach designing privacy in from the start.

Agenda

1. Privacy weak design vs. Privacy strong design- what are the tradeoffs?
2. The 5 Key Privacy Controls
3. Transparency and Translucence- implications for your privacy strategy
4. What could a privacy-friendly Facebook look like instead? (Explore a mock-up of a better privacy user experience for Facebook)
5. Q & A

Who should attend: 
Managers; Directors; VPs; SVP’s; CTO’s; CEO’s any senior manager interested in clarifying usability best practices.