Privacy & Security Center

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Privacy & Security Center

Overview

Website for customers to access the company’s data privacy stance and enact their privacy rights.

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My contribution

Visual Design UX Design UX Research Information Architecture

The team

Year

2019 - 2021

The Problem

The challenge is to ensure customers can easily understand and find and access all the needed information in an expected location on homedepot.com for continued trust shopping with them.

Developed A Plan

Previously, I worked with the stakeholders to implement the privacy request form. After the launch, they entrusted me to build and present a plan with how and what resources I would need to make the new website.

My plan included the research tools, budget needed, and the development of a UX roadmap. The roadmap consists of the goals and questions to be answered for each initiative within a given timeline. These are the initiatives included in the UX roadmap.

Initiative Goal Questions
Understanding Home Depot's customer privacy stance to alleviate customers concerns over their personal data being used at Home Depot. Ensure Home Depot's customers are provided with clarity and understand Home Depot's approach to privacy. What are the expectations of Home Depot's customers when it comes to our company’s approach to privacy? What understanding do Home Depot's customers have of our company’s approach to privacy? What content on the experience homepage is most important to consumers.
Customers to understand the privacy policy to provide transparency, trust, and clarity on information to customers. Ensure Home Depot's customers understand the privacy policy. What are the expectations for customers within the privacy policy? What items within the policy are unclear? What information is most relevant to our customers? Would customers like a downloadable PDF of the full privacy policy? Would customers like a dedicated page in our experience with the full privacy policy? Do customers feel having multiple language options for the full privacy policy page is expected or desired?
Easily find privacy information and tools within the experience so customers don’t have to email or call the call center for help. Ensure there is a clear, organized structure of the content for consumers to find the privacy information and tools within experience. How would customers group the information/pages we provide together? Where do customers expect to see preferences within the experience and homedepot.com? Are customers more prone to learn about privacy on their desktop or mobile device?
Access to privacy information and tools to provide visibility to customers on getting the information they need on privacy. Ensure Home Depot customers can quickly and easily access privacy information and tools within the experience. Where do customers expect to find privacy information and tools on homedepot.com? How easy is it for customers to find the privacy information link within locations on homedepot.com? What label/title would customers expect to find privacy information and tools under?
Ability for different consumers to easily submit privacy requests to their specific privacy needs to give customers confidence in Home Depot using their information in the way we're saying we are. Ensure all of Home Depot's customer types are able to fill out the correct privacy request form. What are the expectations of the different customer types for filling out the privacy request form? How do the different customer types feel when filling out the form? What are the needs of different customer types when filling out the privacy request form? Is the authorized agent form/PDF better than an embedded plain text instructions for “Request on Behalf Of” scenarios? Do customers understand the difference between opt-out of sale vs opt-out of digital sale request?

Competitive Analysis

I looked at over 20 company privacy center experiences across eight industries.

Here’s some of the key insights:

  • Financial, media, software, and retail industries have the most privacy centers.
  • Within financial industries, they have “Privacy Center” as the name of their experience.
  • Majority of experiences had the following content within their experience:
    • Privacy approaches/principles
    • Uses of data
    • Links to help review and update personal information/preferences

I conducted seven interviews with customers to understand their perceptions of the different sites, important content, and trust based on the homepages from the competitive analysis. They were selected based on industry, page design, and content approach.

Overall Results

Important Content
  • Key mission statement
  • Privacy principles
  • How personal information is shared
  • What, how, and who the information is shared with
Language
  • Conversational tone
  • Informational
  • Emphasizes company’s privacy stance
  • Provides transparency
Clean Design
  • Important information and privacy stance highly visible
  • Easy to scan
  • Liked iconography or illustrations as main type of imagery

Page Transformation

I designed many iterations of the pages throughout the process. Some reasons for continued iteration includes:

  • The website URL
  • Usability test results
  • Page content
  • Design standards

These are some wireframes and mock-ups of a few iterations of the homepage.

Navigating the Privacy Statement

The original privacy statement page was hard to navigate and read. I facilitated a design studio for redesigning this page, which brought out different interactions and sections to include.

From testing and the design studio, I added a statement overview page. Both of these pages have a sticky “Table of Contents” section and a ”Back to Top” button for consistency and ease of navigation.

Navigating the Experience

I conducted a card sort and a treejack study to form the main navigation.

First iteration of the main navigation

Continuous Collaboration

I coordinated continuous check-ins with content strategists, the Online Design Operations (ODO) team, and legal stakeholders.

The areas of the design I contributed the most to were the website's main navigation and the hero components of the homepage. When collaborating with the ODO team, it was discussed that these components didn't follow the design system standards. I then spent several design sessions with ODO team members to analyze the site architecture and the results of usability tests to create variations of the home page.

After creating several variations of the components, we realized the product-specific design standards hindered customers from completing their tasks. As a result, I convinced the ODO team to agree to use the main navigation and hero components I originally designed.

Miro board where the Online Design Operations (ODO) team and I worked on the main navigation and hero components of the homepage.

Final Details

I conducted several studies to determine the website name and location of experience on homedepot.com, and preferred logo.

I then ran three name preference studies to help determine the most understandable name associated with the functionality customers can perform.

Some of the names selected for the study were:

  • Privacy Toolbox
  • Consumer Privacy Center
  • Privacy & Security Center

Participants who saw titles like Privacy thought it was too generic and didn't give enough context regarding what the website would provide for them. While names like Privacy & Security Center that incorporated the words ”security” and “center” gave participants a sense of safety and believed it was a central place for them to go for privacy and security information. These were titles participants gravitated towards the most. Stakeholders were worried that the website would be misleading since there wouldn't be any security information. Names like Consumer Privacy Center provided belief the website was a central location for Home Depot’s DIY customer's privacy information, though stakeholders had a concern about alienating Home Depot's Pro and Contractor customers.

From the gathered sentiment on the studied names, the stakeholders and I decided on the new title, Privacy & Security Center.

Outcome

I made Home Depot’s privacy information centralized, more comprehensive, and easier to digest.

The key outcomes:

  • Added site navigation to link all the privacy-related pages.
  • Added a summary page of important information customers cared about the most.
  • Improved the privacy request form page.
  • Built more trust with stakeholders to show the value of UX.
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