Design & Research Process
Design & Research Process
Creativity &
Aesthetics
Technology & Realization
Technology & Realization
Math, Data, & Computing
Math, Data, & Computing
Business & Entrepreneurship
Business & Entrepreneurship
User & Society
DATA PRIVACY MATTERS
Building educational tools to help increase motivation to protect personal data online
ABOUT
Internet addiction, echo chambers, harassment, scams, political influence, and radicalization can be exacerbated by a lack of data privacy. This work addresses how users can protect themselves from issues stemming from privacy. Design probes were used to explore user attitudes related to data privacy and to see if different intervention functions appealed to participants. While no intervention showed results significantly better or worse than another, it is encouraging to see that the activity was generally perceived positively by the participants. This implies that the design interventions that were tested could be researched further and applied to future systems.
DESIGN PROCESS
The project started by exploring underlying problems within social media algorithms. It further gave me the opportunity to investigate how designers and computer scientists can combat these systems, and motivate users to protect themselves online. This gave me the chance to interview experts in fields related to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
This project was also the final project in my trilogy of social media investigations. My first project Doomscrolling investigated why users felt compelled to use social media the way they do and how this impacts their life. This project resulted in design claims which were then built upon in my second project Controlling the Algorithm. In my second project, the user interfaces of social media applications were explored and interventions were created to help enable healthy user interactions. My third and final project, Data Privacy Matters, also explored how social media can be changed to support users. However, this project focuses on user education and behavior change, unlike the previous projects which were working under the assumption that social media corporations will implement change.
FINAL DESIGN PROBES
2022 Spring Semester
Individual Final Masters Research Project
» Wireframing (Adobe XD)
» 100 person crowdsourced survey
» Expert Interviews
» Co-creation Session
The final phase of this project was designing probes which were implemented in a survey to test if different approaches could motivate users to protect their data. These probes were each based on a different intervention function inspired by interviews of experts in AI and the co-creation sessions conducted with computer science and industrial design students. The design probes were built in AdobeXD and incorporated into an online survey released on MTurk, a crowd-sourcing platform where 100 responses were collected. These surveys were built to explore how to best appeal to young, educated users. Each was analyzed to investigate how effective each strategy was at increasing motivation to adopt safe online habits. Additionally, further qualitative data was collected during a demonstration of the project. All of this data, both qualitative and quantitative were then assessed to gain insight into the viability of the different strategies for appealing to the audience about changing their online behavior.