Humane Design: Behavioral Design and Tech for Good

Objective: To eliminate design dark patterns on Facebook and encourage the users to educate themselves on privacy policy online as well as encourage them to take control over how their data is being managed through UI redesign.

In the past few years, Facebook has been hit with lawsuit after lawsuit regarding personal data and privacy issues of users, leading to a decline in the company’s reputation among the public and leading to the creation of a dark pattern in UX/UI design named after Mark Zuckerberg, called "Privacy Zuckering". The company has tried to do everything that it can to restore its image within the minds of its users, from introducing more control over its users’ privacy to changing its name from Facebook to Meta. But has the public been swayed by these attempts? Do people think Facebook still stores their data and sells it to marketizers? What can we do to help Facebook bounce back from these lawsuits and promote the platform as a place to safely communicate? Let’s find out together!

In order to look deeper into the trust issues we are having over Facebook, we have decided to conduct several research to identify the cause of the problem.

We did the interviews with the users by asking them some questions. As a result, we found that Facebook allows people to sync across the apps but the user may want to share only one app and be aware that Facebook tracked personal information. In addition, users usually don’t read the privacy agreements as the text is long. They are not aware of data management settings and want to learn more about it in a more interactive way.

Based on our desk-based research, we found out that the users are not actually fully aware of how much control they have over managing their own data on Facebook as well and a whopping 97% of the users from the US do not read their terms and conditions policy regarding data usage and privacy. These number shows a significant insight into how much users lack awareness of how they can take control over what kind of data is being collected from them and how their private information is used.

Based on the findings of both primary and secondary research, it seems as if people still do not know what kind of control they have over their private data management on the platform, therefore, we have decided to look into all of the settings the platform provide in this topic and compare them to other social media apps.

After analyzing all of the privacy options the selected apps provide, we can see that Facebook does offer more control over how the users can take ownership and decide what kind of information they share with the app. However, all of the settings take a little bit more navigation in order to get access to as shown by the number of steps users have to go through in order to change the privacy settings, highlighting a key insight into why Facebook users are not educated on private policies and take action in allowing how much data their is being collected. This lengthy process of trying to get to a certain page, intentionally designed or not, can be considered a dark pattern in UI/UX design called "Roach Motel".

After conducting our research, we have defined our target personas to be both young adult and millennials who finds Facebook to be untrustworthy and unsafe to use as well as have never actually been educated or made aware of the term and privacy settings and policies on the platform before.

With Facebook is not being trusted by its users because they are not aware of how much Facebook actually offers transparency over how they manage their user's data, we have defined our How Might We question:

In order to tackle this How Might We question, we have come up with a solution in the form of a Design Hypothesis below.

In our solution, we have decided to set the aim to make sure people read the term and condition policy regarding their data privacy management and how much control Facebook provide to its users to our target group. We have used multiple design techniques as listed in the video in detail below.

In our testing plan, we plan to test the prototype with 2 main groups of users which include the young adult group (18 to 24 years old) and the older middle age group (25 to 34 years old).

The link to the prototype is listed below:

In the first few stages of the testing, we focus on getting feedback on the first group first.

Our plan of testing includes:

Step 1: Make the users interact with the prototype until they have successfully interacted with one of our interface designs.

Step 2: Assigning some tasks related to our privacy policy setting and quizzes for them to find their way around in order to complete the tasks without help.

Step 3: Interview them by asking them to describe their understanding of the purpose of the design before explaining what our project is about to the testers, and proceed to ask for their feedback and suggestions.

In our research, we measure the success of our design based on the amount of assumptions we made about how our design work is right or wrong based on the actual testing result, and the time users spent in navigating through the settings and achieving our objective.

Based on the testing result (3 times with the first target group and 1 time with the second target group)

we can see that after each iteration that was made the result of the testing for the first age group is increasing in terms of success as they are able to learn more about how Facebook manages their data and what they can do to customize their data usage, leading to an increase in the level of trust they have over the platform.

For the second group, as the testing phase lasted only one round, the results were a bit more pessimistic as the prototype received poor feedback from the target group as the number of assumptions proven right is less than 5o% and they spent a lot of time trying to understand our design and purpose.

In the future development plans, therefore, we aim to test the prototype more for the older age target group, improving the readability and adding more languages to the interface, in the hope of making our design reach out more to users of other nationalities.

This article is part of a final design project of DBT 416 Planet and Society. We are group 3, a group of interface designers who value privacy and data ownership online for people. We are passionate about what we deliver in terms of design that enables people to gain access and control over their personal information online, in the hope of making the internet a better place to communicate and prosper a safer community.