How can we help people to understand whether a contract is a good fit for them? Like when they are faced with a possible insurance policy, how can we help them make wise, informed choices about whether this policy is a good fit for them?
This piece explores a new risk, scenario-focused set of disclosures.
Here’s a report from the OECD on how to leverage behavioral insights for better complex communication design. A short summary: Governments should be wary of exacerbating information overload when setting mandatory information requirements for businesses. Governments should also bear in mind the importance of form and context in developing such requirements. In particular, governments … Read moreBehavioral insights for online TOS, disclosures, and policies
A 2018 piece describes some new strategies, using usability-oriented design, to present privacy policies in better ways. Its basic design pattern is a summary table, with icons and some call-out boxes (along with a trust seal) to present the policy in a brief overview with a link to a fuller policy. It is important for … Read moreHow to Make Privacy Policies both GDPR-Compliant and Usable by Karen Renaud and Lynsay Shephered
Another article documenting new ways to improve people’s financial decision-making, from Junius Gunaratne, Jeremy Burke, and Oded Nov of NYU and the RAND Corporation: this one “Empowering Investors with Social Annotation When Saving for Retirement.” It profiles one new way to communicate difficult information: digital sticky notes next to the fine print, that give ‘social … Read moreEmpowering Investors with Social Annotation When Saving for Retirement by Junius Gunaratne, Jeremy Burke, and Oded Nov
Another interesting academic study of new interventions to increase understanding: from New York University professors Junius Gunaratne and Oded Nov, “Using Interactive “Nutrition Labels” for Financial Products to Assist Decision Making Under Uncertainty”, published in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68(8):1836–1849, 2017. The abstract: Product information labels can help users understand complex … Read moreUsing Interactive “Nutrition Labels” for Financial Products, by Junius Gunaratne and Oded Nov
Irene Pollach has a short article from September 2007, Communications of the ACM, that analyzes how privacy policies fail to build credibility, trust, and good behavior. Pollach identifies failures in: – what the companies actually say, disclose, and describe in the policies, and – how the companies present this information through their communication style. She … Read moreWhat’s Wrong with Online Privacy Policies? a linguistic analysis of dark patterns by Irene Pollach
UX Magazine has a piece by Ilana Westerman, Making Online Privacy Make Sense, that discusses how a better privacy design can build a bond between an organization and a person. Westerman highlights that legal terms around privacy are intangible, hard to grasp, and are often not valued until they are violated or lost. People don’t … Read moreMaking Online Privacy Make Sense by Ilana Westerman
Here is a sketchnote I made for a privacy law class, summarizing some recent studies on how privacy communications and user behavior works in an online context.
Natasha Lomas & Romain Dillet wrote a small diatribe against the culture of Terms and Conditions legalese and fine print that currently pervades online business-to-consumer contracts. The main indictments: They are written to be unreadable They have not been written for the digital environment, they’ve just been taken from the offline standard & pasted onto … Read moreTerms And Conditions Are The Biggest Lie Of Our Industry, an article from TechCrunch
The New York Times has begun a series of investigative pieces and media clips on the dangers of what is buried in legal fine print in business-to-consumer contracts. There is one on the prevalence of arbitration clauses and the effects they have on people’s constitutional rights to jury trials, and ability to hold corporations accountable. … Read moreBeware the Fine Print: NYTimes investigations into arbitration clauses
via Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers – HBR. As policy makers turn their attention to the private sector, they’re using a similar approach to disclosure—with, if anything, even bigger implications. Ironically, the potential gains to businesses and consumers will come about in part because of the increasing difficulty in making wise decisions about ever-more-complicated products and … Read moreSmarter Information, Smarter Consumers from HBR
Terms of Service: Didn’t Read? Might Not Be a Problem If It’s Browsewrap | Berkeley Technology Law Journal. As websites today develop increasingly complex relationships with visitors, the contracts that define those relationships have become more difficult for companies to impose as binding. Recent litigation surrounding “Terms of Service” (ToS) agreements has put pressure on … Read moreTerms of Service: Didn’t Read? Might Not Be a Problem If It’s Browsewrap
In eWeek, Robert Lemos wrote an article in September 2014, on Data Privacy 'Nutrition Labels' for Web Users Slow to Catch On. The article profiles how difficult privacy notice efforts have it when trying to attract users or sustain momentum. Short-form data privacy notification initiatives for Website visitors have garnered more support in recent months, … Read moreData Privacy ‘Nutrition Labels’ for Web Users Slow to Catch On
A Nutrition Label for Privacy is an academic study by Patrick Kelley, Joanna Bresee, Lorrie Cranor and Robert W. Reeder, from CMU & Microsoft. It profiles a potential way to display legal information to consumers: with a ‘nutrition label’ interface. See more about the Nutrition Label project here. The abstract: We used an iterative design … Read moreA Nutrition Label for Privacy
Taking Information Seriously: Misrepresentation and Nondisclosure in Contract Law and Elsewhere by Richard Craswell :: SSRN. by Richard Craswell, Stanford Law School Abstract: Contract law attempts in various ways to regulate the information that contracting parties exchange. However, most contract law doctrines (and most contract law scholars) have yet to come to grips with the … Read moreTaking Information Seriously: Misrepresentation and Nondisclosure in Contract Law and Elsewhere by Richard Craswell
Here is a law article from last year, by lawyer Adam L. Rosman, about how visual design can be integrated into legal documents. He offers several different examples of how visuals may be used to illustrate and explain. The piece is written primarily to legal practitioners, to help them understand what good visual design may … Read moreVisualizing the Law by Adam L. Rosman
Here is one testing model to see if your designs are successful: 1. Define one or two Research Questions for example, is my design more usable than the status quo? or, does my design increase comprehension compared to the status quo? or, is my design more attractive & engaging compared to the status quo? … Read moreTesting your visual designs
Here’s a legal journal article, Blind Consent? A Social Psychological Investigation of Non-Readership of Click-Through Agreements, on how users approach Click Through legal agreements, and what kind of changes to the designs of these agreements can increase readership & comprehension. Their abstract: Across two studies we aimed to measure empirically the extent of non-readership of … Read moreBlind Consent: notice & click-through-agreements
The Center for Media Design at Ball State University published a short paper on iTunes Terms of Service Redesign. They used a Savannah design student’s proposed modifications to Apple’s TOS design as a jumping off point to do research as to what design would be successful. Their Research Questions: The purpose of this study was … Read moreTOS Redesign study
Visual Law: What Lawyers Need to Learn from Information Designers by Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera on VoxPopulii, Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, May 15, 2013 For decades, words have been lawyers’ tools of trade. Today, we should no longer let tradition force us to think inside the text-only box. Apart from words, there are other … Read moreVisual Law: What Lawyers Need to Learn from Information Designers
Here is a short CHI paper from researchers at Carnegie Mellon about how users use (or do not) a more privacy-aware browser. Their conclusion: Privacy concerns are prevalent among users’ current apprehensions about using the Internet for making purchases. While tools are available to make certain aspects of Internet shopping easier (e.g. comparing prices across … Read moreStudying the Impact of Privacy Information on Online Purchase Decisions
Here’s a talk Ryan Calo gave at Stanford comparing different styles of notice & analyzing what works.
via Consumer Comprehension of Financial Privacy Notices – s70907-21-levy.pdf. This report describes the results of the second phase of a research project focusing on privacy notices that financial institutions are required to provide their customers under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA). The project goals were to better understand consumer comprehension of privacy notices and to assess … Read moreConsumer Comprehension of Financial Privacy Notices
via Against Notice Skepticism In Privacy (And Elsewhere) by Ryan Calo :: SSRN. What follows is an exploration of innovative new ways to deliver privacy notice. Unlike traditional notice that relies upon text or symbols to convey information, emerging strategies of “visceral” notice leverage a consumer’s very experience of a product or service to warn … Read moreAgainst Notice Skepticism In Privacy (And Elsewhere) by Ryan Calo
Laws can be hard to pass and easy to ignore. Regulators are increasingly turning to alternatives to law to influence citizen behavior. This Essay compares three methods that have particularly captured the imagination of scholars and officials in recent years. Much has been written about each method in isolation. This Essay considers them together in … Read moreCode, Nudge, or Notice? by Ryan Calo
