Tag: digital harm

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Consumer Attitudes Towards Product Safety

Report Cover of Consumer Attitudes Towards Product Safety: Physical Consumer Goods vs. Internet Connected Products, featuring a dark purple diagonal section on top with the title and a light purple diagonal section on the bottom, featuring a cartoon of a woman in glasses and a messy bun, holding a papers labeled "product safety" and a thought bubble with a seesaw measuring two, lower white bags on the left side, marked "Injury" and a bag on the higher, right side labeled "loss of privacy"

Just published: “Consumer Attitudes Towards Product Safety: Physical Consumer Goods vs. Internet Connected Products”. In my latest research with Lisa LeVasseur at Internet Safety Labs. we looked consumer perceptions and attitudes of safety of a variety of products. This research received financial support from the Internet Society Foundation.

Yahoo! Finance picked it up!

…and if the 75 min read warning on LinkedIn scares you (it’s mostly charts anyway) jump to the intro and discussion to see what you really should be concerned about as digital makers. This is important information that every product designer and engineer should know.

Some interesting findings about product safety attitudes:

* When it comes to product safety, there’s a double standard among consumers for connected vs. unconnected products.

People expect product makers to be responsible for the safety of things like home goods, cars, cleaning products and the like. But they don’t have the same expectation when it comes to websites, Smart TVS and mobile apps.

* Many consumers appear unaware of the causal connection between personal and societal harms such as physical, emotional, reputational, and financial damage and the systemic loss of privacy tied to connected products and services.

Product consumers are subjecting themselves to more harms than they think when they trust digital product makers to take proper care of their personal information.

* Even though survey respondents didn’t score mobile apps as the “least safe” option—websites, smart automobiles and smart homes got that dubious honor—consumers expressed more concern about the safety of apps than the safety of other internet-connected products.

If you find that last point interesting, you will find Internet Safety Lab’s AppMicroscope educating. App Microscope displays Safety Labels for mobile applications. Currently, App Microscope contains over 1700 apps studied in the ISL 2022 K-12 EdTech safety benchmark.

Read the full report at Internet Safety Labs:

Consumer Attitudes Towards Product Safety: Consumer Products vs Internet-Connected Products:

Look for other reports in a summary of my work for Internet Safety Labs.

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UX-LX: Preventing Digital Harm Keynote and Searcher Behavior Workshop

In May, I was invited to speak at UX Lisbon, on Preventing Digital Harm in Online Spaces. At the main event, I presented the Internet Safety Lab’s framework for preventing digital harm in connected products. This included a discussion of the relationship technologies have with consumers. I demonstrated techniques designers should adopt to mitigate the digital harms and dark patterns that could potentially violate that relationship. You can download my presentation below.

User Experience Lisbon 2023
Download the PDF

On the first day of the event, I ran a half-day, pre-conference workshop titled “Designing Effective Search Strategies.” In this session, I introduced a new framework using observation as a powerful tool to understand site search behavior. To explore this, we broke into seven groups and worked on empathy maps, search personas and mapping the user journey. I also introduced including group personas (2 of the groups took as a hint to discover cocktail lounges in Lisbon). As a takeaway, all participants received a toolkit for crafting these artifacts and a step-by-step process to enhance product search. We got to eat yummy Portuguese snacks, too!

Lisbon Convention Center
Search behavior workshop: three woman and a pair of hands at a table with pens, sticky notes and a closed laptop computer
Search behavior workshop output: empathy map and task flow diagrams with yellow and pink sticky notes on white butcher paper.
Search behavior workshop output: empathy map made of black and purple marker on white paper
Two trays of breakfast sandwiches and pastais de natas, a Portuguese custard tart

“Noreen … made the interesting point that if we build an accessible design we’ll also be solving many search problems.”

— UXLx: UX Lisbon

What a wonderful event, interesting and welcoming people and an absolutely unforgettable time!

I am available to teach your team preventing or mitigating digital harm. Or lead a workshop on how to understand user search behavior. I can lead workshops solo or with my colleagues at Information Architecture Gateway. Let me know if we can help.

Read the UXLX Write-ups at Medium:

UXLX 2023 Wrap Up: Workshops

UXLX 2023 Wrap Up: Talks Day

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CPPA Stakeholder Meeting Discusses “Dark Patterns”

On May 5, 2022, I participated in the California Privacy Protection Agency’s (CPPA) stakeholder meeting, making a public statement about “dark patterns” which I urged them to redefine as “harmful patterns,” and suggested changes to their definitions of “Consent” and “Intentional Action.”

As Jared Spool says, we should be looking at the UX outcome of design decisions, not just the intent, as many designers adopt strategies or work with underlying technologies whose outcomes can be harmful to the technology user and other stakeholders. These UI patterns may not have the intent to do harm. Often the designers’ intent is to provide convenience or a useful service.

Take accessibility overlays that intend to provide a better experience for people with visual or cognitive disabilities but have the effect of overriding necessary controls. Even patterns that affect user behavior, like staying on a page longer, clicking on a link, accepting default cookie settings, etc. may be intended to provide convenience to users, but unknowingly to both the designer and the user, there are processes underlying many of these tools that share data and information about the transaction that can be harmful.

CPRA is defining what it means to consent to data collection and what an intentional user action is. It addresses “dark patterns” as an intentional deception, when often the digital harm is not intentional, yet is deep-rooted. We are hoping to make these harms clearer and provide guidelines for addressing them through our ISL Safe Software Specification.

Read more about the CPPA stakeholder meeting and my statement on behalf of the Internet Safety Labs (formerly the Me2B Alliance):

Statements to the California Privacy Protection Agency during their Stakeholder Sessions
Digital Harms Dictionary 2.0
ISL Safe Software Specification for Websites and Mobile Apps v1.1