Privacy Education
Role: Product Designer | Team: Growth Activation | Duration: June - July 2023 | Tools: Figma, Figjam
Background
Strava is a web and mobile service for tracking physical activity. During my summer Product Design internship, I had the opportunity to work with the Growth Activation team on a new privacy education project. Building on insights from a previous marketing campaign, we found that early activity recording decreased significantly among women and users who had not engaged with Strava’s privacy and safety settings. In response, I focused on designing opportunities that enhance users' peace of mind during their initial experiences on the app.
Insights
Outdoor Safety
Outdoor safety is a concern, and people worry about who can see their activities
Findability
Users have a hard time finding Privacy Controls
Beacon
Users feel Beacon feature is important
Lack of Knowledge
The majority of users do not know they can control their map visibility
Opportunities
Opportunity 1: Logged-out Experience
I created two variants that would work as a safety education slide that would be added to the apps' existing carousel before a user signs into the mobile app, along with other screens highlighting ways to use the app and features available to users.
Opportunity 2: In-Feed Experience
This opportunity adds a new experience to the Strava homepage. The goal here was to introduce feature knowledge within a central part of the mobile app; acting as a brief tutorial and allowing direct access for users to control each specific settings.
There are two carousel variants in this opportunity. One blend into a users’ home feed to act as a gentle nudge to users who may have not adjusted certain settings yet. The other variant is a modal carousel with more pop-out characteristics.
Opportunity 3: Record Screen
The final opportunity I outlined exists within the record screen. As a user is about to start recording an activity, a small coach mark would appear educating users on the Beacon feature while leading their eyes to the icon of this feature.
Iterations
Shots from my Figma Playground including explorations on single-feature highlights and variants on modal visuals
Wrap Up
This project was an amazing opportunity to lean more into collaboration with different members of the product team as well as growing my own confidence as a designer! While this specific project did not get shipped, Strava continues to think about privacy and safety on the app.
Additional learnings from my time at Strava:
Importance of leveraging business needs vs user needs. While designing, it is imperative to stay connected to the end goals of an interaction. While designing for the record screen variants, I wanted to make users aware of the Beacon feature but also it was important to realize the constraints as our ultimate goal was to make sure users hit the 'Record' button; as my solutions needed to not distract users from that goal.
Your first designs suck. And this is okay! Iterating is part of the process and occasionally, time away from a design can serve you well.
Quality feedback and critique is invaluable. I typically walked away from a design critique with more exciting ideas than I started with! Gathering fresh perspectives aids new idea generation.
If I had more time:
Run un-moderated testing. I would have loved to gather insights on each of my highlighted opportunity spaces in the app to educate users on the privacy and safety features available. I especially would like more exposure to UserTesting.com and all of its capabilities! In doing so, I would have also liked to continue ideating on single-feature explorations that had smaller interactions in the app.