AT&T Privacy Bird - Contextual Design and Usability Analysis
Privacy Bird is original developed by AT&T to help Internet users stay informed about the (Platform for Privacy Preferences) P3P policy of websites.
The principle investigator of this project was Dr. Lorrie Cranor, the chairperson of the P3P Specification working group, designer of the AT&T Privacy Bird P3P user agent, and the author of the book Web Privacy with P3P (O'Reilly 2002).
Our group was responsible for the redesign of the application interface. HCI methods like Contextual Inquiries/Design, Heuristic Evaluation, Think Aloud, etc were executed to generate redesign ideas.
Research Findings
The findings from Heuristic Evaluation can be grouped into 4 categories: Graphic Attributes, Pop-up Summary, Privacy Summary and Preferences.
Regarding the existing program interaction, we suggested to streamline the information display (Users don’t want to think). Program feature should be able to accessed easily. Last but not least, work has to be done to improve the readability of the privacy policy summaries.
In order to increase the Privacy Bird adoption, new features were suggested:
- Enable P3P Auto-fill
- Create peer preferences and trust networks
- Create Repository for holding information on purchases
The redesign prototypes are illustrated in the next section.
Redesign Prototypes
An overview of the current version of Privacy Bird can be found in the official Privacy Bird website.
There is a lot of protential for improvement for the privacy summary page. The current version of the summary page is as shown below, versus our redesign prototype for the page (open new window) .
The current privacy summary page.
The bird icon - which gives you fast information about whether or not a web site's privacy policy matches your personal preferences.
Pop-up menu
Preferences. In the current version the preference settings are distributed into separate windows. We procposed to integrate them into a single window with tabbed panes.
A new design for the privacy preferences tab pane.
Privacy policy warnings. In the current version the warning messages are displayed in a mouse-over window with plain texts. Readablity will be greatly improved if a graphical sumary is shown, as demonstrated in the new design.