User Agreement Redesign
Overview
Researches have found that most people do not read user agreement. We just blindly agree to whatever it is there. In essence, it means that we sign an contracts without even what's inside. This project is a redesign of the user agreement webpage by adding highlight and user annotations of specific terms. It also includes a term notice system when user trigger certain activity.
Duration
July 2019 - September 2019
Catogory
UI design
UX design
UX tools
value proposition
quantitive research
Background
In 2018, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana confronted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the transparency of the social media company’s policies during a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees.
“Here’s what everyone’s been trying to tell you today — and I say it gently — your user agreement sucks.”
Whether the user agreement we agree with sucks or not, there is a more severe issue: nobody reads them. In an experiment, 98% out of 543 students click to agree to give NameDrop (a virtual company) their future firstborn children. Only ¼ of the 543 bother to LOOK at the fine print. LOOK not READ. And after a minute, all of them click to agree.
No matter who is to blame, these internet companies who create them or users who are supposed to read them, it is undoubtful a problem waiting to be solved desperately. And there definitely exist a big design opportunity.
Research
Secondary research
This issue automatically is a complex one. In order to have a basic knowledge about this issue, I studied and reviewed some literature on this topic. Here is the key takeaways from an article publish by a professor from University of Michigan.
There are three main factors contribute to why users do not read user agreement. The first one is its inherent complexity. Not only is it time consuming, it also requires college-level reading skills. Patience is not something we are familiar with on the internet. Second reason, probably the most important one, is that these pieces of information often shown to you in a bad timing. When you first sign up in a new service, you do not even have a basic idea of what this platform is about. And then you are asked to agree with some contract. Nobody would care about who owns the copyright of the photo until they wants to post one online. The final reason concerns a foundamental difference of purpose for different parties involved. Companies create user agreement to avoid law suits. Consumers need information for better choice regarding their privacy, interests, etc…Regulators investigates companies and enforce compliance with regulation.
A solution on the market
The author is part of the Usable Privacy Policy Project. This organization developed a way to make privacy notices more effective. They use advances in artificial intelligence such as natural language processing as well as crowdsourcing to analyze and classify specific terms without requiring additional cooperation from website operators. It feels kind of like make contents for the books (if we compare these agreements to huge books).
Primary research: survey
This survey is finished by 83 participants. 44.57% of the participants are male, while 55.43% are female. 84% of their age falls in the set of 18 - 24. More than 94% of them have a bachelor’s or higher degree( 78.31% bachelor, 13.45% master, 2.41% above).
key take-aways
only a small portion of participants read user agreement (about 16%), 64.3% of these people try to avoid some “trap“, while the remaining 35.7% read them to know users rights and responsibilities.
More than half of those do not read user agreements out of the belief that reading them will not change anything. The second most common reason is that they see them as something complicated and cubersome.
Customers are not unaware of the risks for not reading the contracts. They consider this wrongdoing a threat to their own interest (83%). It can also cause misunderstanding between customers and companies. Nearly 90% of the participants asked for a redesign of user agreement.
Research Insights
Ideation
Value Proposition
After finishing this value proposition, I found two main design focuses. The first one is to make the user agreement page more fun and engaging. At the same time, highlight the most important information and develop a more clear structure for user to navigate through. The second focus is make specific terms notice or alerts tailored to user activities. That means only give user information when they need them most.
How to solve key problems
While value proposition make it easy to have a general and strategic picture of the final design to solve this perplexing problem, I had to think through how to solve specific problems one by one.
Wireframes
Based on the value proposition and ideation, I created these wireframes to understand the basic structure of the final UI. In this ideation phase, I created these wireframes to presenting the user agreement webpage redesign (including highlight, annotation) and user agreement notification.
Final Design
Webpage
After the hearing, Facebook has changed the language of their user agreement so that even a 7-year-old can understand. They also made the pages more clearly structured in design sense. My version of this webpage redesign did not change the basic structure of the original one. Instead, I add some small features to make it more engaging and socialable. Taking inspiration from kindle, I designed the page showing using the most highlighted sentences (which could highly possibly means the most important to notice). Users can add annotation or comments to a specific terms. This annototation could includes their own translation of this term, personal experience and some small reminders. In this way, this webpage encourages user engagement. People are more willing to read or even just open this page.
Terms notice
Terms notice is a alert or pop-up of specific terms when user triggered certain actions. For example, when user tries to post a photo on instagram for the first a few times, this alert tells user the related policy about copyright. It can not only act as an inform, but also some shortcut to change a few setting. When user comes across an ad, the notice will pop up, informing facebook’s advertisement policy. Besides, there is a button for user to go to ad preference setting (in current facebook app, user need at least 6 steps to get the job done) and make some changes.
