Designing a Comprehensive Privacy Policy : A qualitative comparative study

Abstract: Social media platforms have to provide a privacy or data policy for users of their services and these legal documents tend to demonstrate characteristics of poor user experience design. A majority of users have difficulties understanding the privacy policy due to the long and legalistic nature of these documents, which will result in fewer readers. By investigating the users’ attitudes towards the privacy policy on the social media platform Instagram, a prototype of an alternative privacy policy aimed to enhance the users’ engagement was designed. The Double Diamond model was used to investigate the design process of the prototype. This included an initial literature study together with qualitative interviews. The results from the interviews showed that participants rarely read privacy policies due to their long and illegible nature and that a more comprehensible policy would be helpful. The final design of the prototype was created iteratively after feedback from the user tests. The novel prototype was found to be easy to comprehend and faster to navigate than the original data policy. The majority of the users also expressed a preference for the alternative prototype. The interesting results from this preliminary study can be taken further in a full-scale study with a larger participant sample with representation from different age groups.