<aside> đź“Ť I designed a feature education campaign that increased discovery and adoption of a complex privacy feature by over 500%
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[definition of concept]
The idea that all users should have a basic level of privacy protection turned on by default, rather than their personal data being public by default.
I worked as the lead Product Designer, partnering with one UX Researcher, Data Analyst, Product Manager, and a small team of iOS, Android, and web engineers.
I joined this initiative after discovery and early design of the concept had kicked off, and I primarily contributed through iteration and refinement of an existing concept, feature education, navigating legal/compliance regulations, and designing experiments.
Strava is a community for athletes to record physical activities, like a run or a bike ride, and share their progress with friends. It’s a social media platform for workouts – a place for users to record activities that they’re doing in the real world, often starting and ending at their own front door, or their friend’s house, or on private property.
The activity map reveals sensitive, pattern-of-life information, and many athletes didn’t want the world or even their social networks to know what their run routes are or exactly which house they live in. In 2018, Strava introduced a feature that would hide up to a 1 mile radius around specific addresses, but over time, this became the top privacy-related Customer Support ticket users complained about. It wasn’t flexible. It was hard to discover and comprehend. Bad actors were finding ways to abuse and uncover hidden areas with the use of third party tools.
The team also wanted to use this as a relatively low-risk way to experiment with a “safe by default” approach to privacy controls, and resolve concerns that limiting information shared on an activity would diminish engagement or growth on the platform. In the existing paradigm, athletes must opt in for privacy protections. In a safe-by-default world, athletes would have to opt out to have a fully visible presence.
Partnering with an embedded Data Analyst and UX Researcher, we identified a few themes to solve for in the design process: