"We Wanted to Do Better Than the Law": Exploring UI/UX Designers' Privacy Advocacy in Practice

TL;DR

This study investigates how UI/UX designers perceive and implement privacy considerations in collaborative settings, highlighting challenges and adaptive strategies to promote privacy-aware design.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into designers' privacy practices, emphasizing the influence of personal, contextual, and team factors, and suggests organizational and tool-based improvements.

Findings

Designers' privacy values are shaped by personal and contextual factors.

Challenges include balancing privacy with business goals and team dynamics.

Designers employ adaptive methods to navigate privacy implementation in teams.

Abstract

Designers hold primary responsibility for shaping the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of a product. This role goes beyond aesthetics and usability, extending to the privacy outcomes of user experience, which often emerge through collaboration with other stakeholders such as developers, product managers, and marketing teams. Previous studies on enhancing privacy for technological products primarily focused on the roles of developers -- understanding their needs and challenges -- but limited effort is devoted to examining how UI/UX designers consider and approach privacy in their work. Through 12 semi-structured interviews with privacy-advocating UI/UX designers, we explore the perceptions, influencing factors, challenges, and adaptive methods they use regarding privacy implementation. We pay special attention to how these challenges and adaptations play out in team-based settings where decisions are negotiated together. Our study reveals how personal and contextual factors shape designers' value of privacy, the collaborative nature of the challenges designers face when trying to prioritize privacy, and how they navigate tensions between business goals, team dynamics, and technical development. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for advocating a user-centered approach for supporting privacy-aware design, suggestions for organizational-level changes and bridging knowledge gaps through designer-centric tools and community building.