People go to Google searches and other methods outside of Meta to understand and address their privacy concerns. This can lead users to unrepeatable sites to get information about their problems. Privacy Center is a situation-based solution that allows users to learn and manage their privacy across the Meta family of apps.
As of January 2022, Privacy Center has launched! Here is an article about the experience.
Product Design: Lee Jones, Abby Mills
Content Design: Emily Shields, Misti Pinter
User Research: Denise Sauertig
Product Manager: Alex Andon
Before 2022 Meta, did not have a cohesive story about its privacy practices. Consent moments, the policy and exploring settings were the ways people interacted with Meta’s privacy story for each product individually. This makes it hard for users to know what rights they have and forced them to rely on external sources (articles and blog sites) to tell the story and provide helpful information about how to control their experience.
Meta’s privacy controls and privacy story are fragmented. There is a lack of a place to learn about the privacy concerns someone may have and how to address them.
5 core privacy concerns were discovered through research:
These became the foundation of what we would design for and the bases of the initial topics the Privacy Center would cover.
User Goal: Quickly, understand a privacy concept, understand if it relates to me and know what actions I have to solve it.
Business Goal: Educate people on their privacy options and make it easier for them to understand how our practices affect them. So that they feel comfortable and empowered using Meta’s products. To reduce the prevalence and severity of tangible people problems people were reporting to us, and to increase people’s trust in Meta, better enabling our first outcome.
Privacy Center’s core users for the initial scope were low-technical literacy users of the Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger apps. Technical literacy is defined as an individual’s ability to independently and effectively use technology tools to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create and communicate information. Technological literacy prepares individuals to make well-informed choices in their role as consumers.
Our design approach was to focus on 4 main things:
1. We simplified the architecture of the pages to address what we called “concerns”. “Concerns” are problems or challenges research has found are shared across platform by people. When people have a privacy “concern”, people need to be able to locate the solution as quickly as possible.
In the new designs, we structured the page with 3 key points:
2. Simplified the overall architecture of the site. The previous design focused more on education, which led to layers of information the user had to sift through. The final design approach was to balance task completion with learning. So that a person can understand that the information provided is related to their circumstances and what immediate next steps they have to rectify their concern. People come to our platforms to engage with other people not learn about privacy. So simplifying the structure made it easier for a person to find what they need and go about there day.
3. Context! Context! Context! One overlooked thing in design, I believe, is content. The simple addition of a well-crafted, straight to the point sentence or a header, can help set people up for success. However, context also permeates through setting expectations of where their clicks will take them. Since This is a surface that spans across multiple products, we need to set people up for success in addressing the right profile on the correct product.
4. Meeting people where they means meeting them with their concept of a “Family of apps” in regard to Meta. “Family of apps” refers to all Meta owned products (Facebook, Instagram, Oculus, etc.) as they might relate to each other or that these products build an ecosystem. We needed to address that by meeting people with their current understanding and our current landscape. This meant that from a design perspective we would address the concerns by delineating what that means and how it can be addressed based on specific apps.
Our research partners had developed heuristics evaluation criteria. A heuristic evaluation is a usability method for finding usability problems in a user interface design, thereby making them addressable and able to be solved as part of an iterative design process. Which is essentially a list of scenarios that represent real users’ problems discovered in research, that can be iterated towards and measured.
This list of scenarios was given to testers along with a high-fidelity prototype and they were asked to navigate the prototype and finally fill out a survey where they were asked to rate the experience. This was compared to the same survey being tested with previous experience.
We developed a scalable design system that has been used by other teams to educate users on specific concepts and provide access to the tools they need to solve their problems. Such as the “Teens” guide, which provides privacy-related education and tools for people under 18 years of age.
Since its launch, Privacy Center has seen success in helping people solve their privacy concerns quickly.
Keeping your experience simple and straightforward is powerful. While going through reviews, be it with legal or stateholders. It is common for questions to arise and problems not stated to addressed in your experience. Stepping back and understanding what the core problems are and asking does your experience solves those problems can be powerful to stay focused.
Kinda related to the first point but I think it deserves it own statement. Understand what the core problems are, if you don’t fully understand what you are solving for, it can be hard to have convictions for the experience you are building. Feedback comes from many places and you need a way to determine what to internalize and what to set to the side for now.
Lastly, a strong content designer can help do a lot of the heavy lifting. I had the pleasure to work with some great Content Designers. Not all problems need to be designed through UX or UI. A well-placed, short, articulated sentence can help set the context for users. Just like UX patterns and color help a user with their task, content is another tool that is often overlooked.
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