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Experientia has worked for Samsung Electronics on a wide variety of projects since 2005 that covered different phases of their design process. This project was commissioned from Samsung South Korea and aimed to understand how users interpret privacy, both from a wide and narrow perspective, in order to support Samsung in the design of new privacy-related products and services.
3 things to know
What users are talking about when they say “Privacy”
For people privacy is an important good in itself.
Privacy concerns are higher in a mobile ecosystem; to overcome this issue, companies have to rely on the trust that people grant them, and should aim to build stronger user confidence.
Security and Privacy are different breeds
The tech community has pushed a narrative where privacy is articulated as data security, which in turn gets translated in settings and features. This is challenging for people.
Being comfortable with one’s own data
What people share in the digital environment is tightly associated with the perceived risk of this action. The seriousness of risk is identified by two dimensions: the perceived distance of data disclosure consequences, and the affinity to people’s daily lives.
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Context
People who care about their privacy often feel that they are “forced” to disclose personal data, and are concerned that they don’t really know what they are really disclosing. To map this better, it’s important to start with the acknowledgement that peoples’ notions of privacy often differ significantly from how the industry and media approach this subject.
Challenge
Samsung asked Experientia to conduct a research to understand how users interpret privacy, in order to gain insights on users’ habits and concerns related to smartphone use, and to define UX solutions that tackle their pressing needs.
Research
Experientia conducted a thorough assessment of key privacy features in 3 devices. Social media listening shed light on the ongoing discussion about privacy on social media.
We also interviewed users in different countries to collect a direct account of what they think privacy means for them and identify key aspects of people’s everyday life that are impacted by technology and how these aspects raise privacy safeguard concerns.
The team finally engaged in conversations with experts to earn insights on broader privacy implications to add value to the research as they helped in identifying some crucial topics to discuss with users.
Design
Based on the fieldwork evidence, Experientia defined a privacy framework to synthesize how people address their privacy needs in the digital domain. The issues identified by researchers were re-formulated as “How might we…” questions. Experientia identified several high-level opportunities indicating possible alternative options to tackle each broader research-driven issue. Each issue with its challenge and connected recommendations was addressed by a set of opportunities indicating potential areas of intervention.
Impact
Experientia helped Samsung in better understanding privacy from peopler’s perspective and in defining human-centered design directions and actionable principles that could enhance the user experience addressing users’ pressing needs while simultaneously achieving two objectives: “make safe” and “feel safe”.