Build strong privacy practices for Geocaching players
Release
2021
Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
1 Product Designer, 1 Product Manager, 8 Developers (Web, iOS & Android)
Timeline
~2 months for web, ~1 month for mobile
As Geocaching is constantly striving to increase the game’s reach to the global player community, it is essential to maintain the privacy of all the players by implementing robust privacy and security practices.
At the time I started working on this project, the company didn’t have any concrete set of privacy practices and any players could easily access other players’ caching history, photos, statistics, and much more. The company was obliged to provide privacy settings to its users to comply California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the EU.
Build strong privacy policies and practices around the game by providing players meaningful control over what they share and with whom they share.
Provide players with robust privacy controls to explore Geocaching in a more personalized and secure manner.
Comply California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This project consists of two parts, which are web and mobile. As the lead designer, I designed the privacy control page for both platforms.
Since this project was a legal requirement, the team had only a few months to build and deliver this feature. Therefore, although the profile and settings pages on the website still have dated UI and UX, the team decided to keep the scope minimum and decided to focus on delivering the privacy control functionalities themselves without UI updates.
While working on this project, I learned that the legal’s view is quite conservative and seeks the safest solutions. This is for the users’ benefit, but as a product designer, I had to also consider the business impact of this project. Here are a few examples of how I communicated and provided alternative solutions to alleviate their concerns and support the community and players.
By the time I was assigned to the project, stakeholders have decided which items of the user profile information should be included in this project. After reviewing, I concluded that the list would be revisited to incorporate the community aspect of the game. Therefore, I started my own mapping process to start a new conversation with the stakeholders and change the scope.
As a result, a few items were removed from the scope of this project, which is crucial to show the users’ identities as “Geocachers”, not themselves.
I thought it is undesirable to set the default value to private. While users tend to settle for default settings, some player information is crucial to be public due to the nature of the Geocaching. Therefore, I suggested making all information public by default, but clearly communicating the current settings on the profile page and the privacy control page accessible so that they can change easily if they want to.
One of the legal’s concerns was that the Cookies and Authorizations are privacy-related items and should be accessible within the privacy settings. To minimize the development effort, I suggested nesting the Cookies and Authorizations under the group called “Privacy” along with the privacy settings page, and the idea was accepted by legal.
This feature was released to reviewers and employees only before the official launch to test usability overall and to make sure that the engineers find and fix bugs as much as possible. I closely worked with the developers to cover edge cases that were found during the test period.
The current privacy setting is clearly communicated for each page so that users can check the setting and change easily. Key information is still communicated in different languages while the text is ellipsized.
The icons communicate the setting at a glance which were created in collaboration with a UI designer.
It is important to communicate the reason why the content is not available to other players. The community’s beloved mascot, Signal the Frog is a viewer in this illustration which was created in collaboration with the Creative Studio at Geocaching.
Explanations on each setting are provided and all related pages are linked for relevant items. The copies on the page were created in collaboration with the content manager and legal.
Mobile screens follows the current design patterns of the Geocaching app.
The privacy settings feature for the web was launched on March 2022 while the mobile settings page is still under construction. The company now follows CCPA and GDPR and provides users a wide range of privacy settings for the data they are providing as well as creating.