Security and privacy will influence UX Design

Security and privacy will influence UX Design

Matt one of the writers of Buzzfeed lost his iPhone in 2014. It was the last that he heard of it when he was sipping beer in a New York bar. One year later, he started seeing strange photographs in his new iPhone photo stream, photographs that he had not taken. These were photographs of a strange Chinese man in an orange orchard. Later on, it was realized that the stolen iPhone landed up in China, and the man was still logged in through Matt’s iCloud.

After the Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg privacy issues got highlighted, privacy, security has come to the forefront again. and with it, there are aspects of User Experience Design that UX designers need to keep in mind. I am highlighting a few things below: —

What is security and privacy influenced user experience?

Think of when you go to your internet banking home page. While entering the username and password, you also have options of typing through the virtual keyboard. This is an example of security influenced user experience. The feature has been built keeping in mind security and better user experience. iPhone fingerprint unlock or face recognition to unlock are other features that security influenced user experience. Other smaller examples are when you can toggle between “Show password” in the password tab, as users make a lot of mistakes while typing on the mobile phone.

Moments, where security or privacy influenced user experience, is invoked

At the time of task flows, it is important to identify those tasks and subtasks that are privacy or security sensitive. Some tasks are clearly privacy sensitive. At the time of putting a password, doing a banking transaction or entering the ATM pin. but there are some tasks wherein the UX designers need to probe with an empathy map on what does the user actually feel. For example, emails are generally supposed to be private, but the design should not be such that a person walking by the computer should be able to read it. Or while a person scrolls through his Facebook page while walking with friends, the design should not be as such that all posts and videos can be seen by the group as well.