A personalized experience is one of the most highly valued features of a modern website design. However, gathering the right consumer data is essential to provide customized services to website visitors. After all, you can only enhance consumer experience and provide a better service if you recognize customers to a degree.

The problem is, sometimes, such personalization comes at the cost of your users’ privacy.

There’s a way around this though. You can prioritize privacy UX, build trust, and still generate revenue. If done correctly, a user-focused approach can turn into conversions and make you a stronger player in your market.

Let’s see some common pitfalls and opportunities that you can use for your business or personal website.

Why Personalization Is Not for Everyone

Internet users are widely concerned about handing over their personal data for privacy and security reasons. Consumers value their privacy greatly and expect online services to do the same, which is why they reject businesses that don’t seem to get this right.

People use many external tools to protect their activities. For instance, a VPN for PC and other internet-connected devices is one of the ways users defend themselves. A Virtual Private Network encrypts traffic and hides IP addresses.

This stops certain web entities from collecting certain information about users’ behaviors and locations. However, besides using external security and privacy tools, companies themselves need to build safer environments.

With all that in mind, finding the perfect equilibrium between gathering as much information as possible and maintaining consumer trust and value is challenging but possible. Here’s more about how to do that by reinventing your design choices for privacy permission elements.

Selected design patterns can overcomplicate specific processes, like cookie notifications, that pop up every time you visit a website. Usually, such pop-up messages follow “dark patterns“, meaning that certain design elements coerce users into agreeing with likely unfavorable terms.

About Privacy Permissions

The process of data gathering begins with the privacy permission element. Since most people agree to the default privacy permission settings in online services and apps, companies and organizations must carefully consider their design choices’ influence on privacy permissions.

Namely, privacy permissions represent an outstanding opportunity for organizations to incorporate an innovative approach combining compliance, privacy, and web design. Not only will this allow organizations to unlock valuable data from their customers, but it will also help them design an empowering customer journey.

Blending Customer Experience and Compliance

Most organizations believe there are only two different ways to approach the privacy issue – from the perspective of customer experience and compliance. As a result, the fear of being non-compliant creates two main problems for companies.

• Blindly following the law. Just because some companies follow the law rigorously doesn’t mean they’re compliant. Customers need to understand the legal terms used in privacy policy notices, which obstruct them from making an informed decision regarding their privacy.
• Copying the competitors. Organizations will often copy the competitors and use features found in other domains without considering the impact these settings have on the customer experience. Just because your competitors implement certain decisions doesn’t mean they’re compliant or beneficial for customers.

However, blending customer experience and compliance is possible, which allows companies to get the best of both worlds.

How to Reinvent Design Choices for Better Privacy

Here are a few clever ideas if you’re curious about how you can reinvent design choices for privacy permission elements.

Innovation Is the Key

Using default copies of privacy and permissions won’t lead to a valuable customer experience. For a customer, simplicity is always welcome, so try sticking to a friendlier tone instead of using corporate language. Just make sure to remember all vital information.

Moreover, the well-known cookie pop-up is the reason behind “consent fatigue,” which can prevent customers from engaging in a meaningful way. By implementing simple UX features that make the overall experience more user-friendly, customers can easily control their preferences and manage different privacy features.

For example, toggles and layering features work great at bringing all management and privacy features together in one setting.

Take Google as an example of a simple way to change your cookie pop-up. Of course, it did so after receiving a fine, but it made some positive changes that you can also adapt. Essentially, the new cookie banner will have buttons in the same size and color. Furthermore, one button will allow you to reject all cookies without needing to customize your choices deeper.

Implement User Research and Testing

Finding out how customers interact with and react to the permission experience is extremely valuable when reinventing design choices. Thanks to user research and testing, companies can collect enough data to create the best designs for privacy permission elements.

First, questionnaires can be used for user research. Through research, companies find out what permissions customers prefer. Nevertheless, more than research is needed to create the best-performing solutions.

That’s where user testing comes into play. What customers claim in questionnaires and what they do in real-life situations are often different, which explains the need for A/B testing.

By combining user research and testing results, organizations can develop the best designs for privacy permission elements.

Emphasize the Importance of Privacy

Privacy is everyone’s business, so UX designers and compliance experts should do everything in their power to protect their website visitors’ privacy. Even though their primary job is to achieve regulatory compliance or increase customer sign-ups, there’s no need to rely on dark patterns.

Instead, designers, business leaders, and privacy experts should focus on improving the customer experience. They can easily do that by advising customers to use contemporary solutions that optimize their privacy experience.

Furthermore, not all consumer data privacy aspects are governed by technical frameworks or laws. Thus, foster responsible data use that would drive innovation forward.

Ethical UX Approach Paired With Content

Ideally, you want your design decisions to make sense to your users. However, it is easy to fall down the rabbit hole of well-known approaches. For instance, UX and web teams should work closely with talented content writers. Thus, once you come up with an interface structure that ticks all the boxes, content should follow respectfully.

The phrase “we value your privacy” is used by thousands of providers. So it’s up to you to break the cycle of repetitive patterns. After all, if someone reads a statement repeatedly, it might start to mean nothing. Innovative ideas can also help you build your brand. For instance, even a cookie notification can stand out from the rest with its design and content. Thus, every addition to your website is an opportunity to nurture your brand image.

The Bottom Line

As personalization becomes one of the top strategies for business success and customers grow aware of the numerous privacy issues, organizations must find innovative solutions to allow customers to choose how their data is used and still equip companies with the needed information.

With the right design choices, domain owners can make the most out of their privacy permission elements and blend customer experience with compliance. From the design, UX, and web teams, users expect to receive the most efficient way to change their privacy settings. Thus, do not make it overly complicated just because it favors your corporate goals. Users should not have to go through multiple websites to find and disable certain overly intrusive features.