An Issue of Discoverability – ADV492/CS468 Team Project
Location: Virtual (Discord)
Duration: 2 hour
We finalized the presentation slides. We did a trial recording followed by an actual recording. We edited the video and uploaded a final version to YouTube.
Presentation slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Gx72HuAWlKY4vv3VRChjhF8kNS1wSLOP5wP_6vGqkZU/edit?usp=sharing
Location: Virtual (Discord)
Duration: 1 hour
We updated the presentation slides and made revisions to the figma designs.
Updated figma designs: https://www.figma.com/file/TzEaOHefAshyiNubQVhXpS/Search-Baron-UI-Late-March?node-id=0%3A1
Presentation slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Gx72HuAWlKY4vv3VRChjhF8kNS1wSLOP5wP_6vGqkZU/edit?usp=sharing
Location: Discord/Google Drive/Figma
Duration: 2 hours throughout the week
We discussed a concrete plan of who’s responsible for what and executed it. Our changes were finalized on Figma by Max who presented it via Discord call to the rest of the team, while everyone else focused on getting the presentation ready for our video, as well as updating our project website.
Finalized figma: https://www.figma.com/file/TzEaOHefAshyiNubQVhXpS/Search-Baron-UI-Late-March?node-id=0%3A1
Presentation slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Gx72HuAWlKY4vv3VRChjhF8kNS1wSLOP5wP_6vGqkZU/edit?usp=sharing
Location: Discord/Google Drive
Duration: Total of 2 hours between Monday (4/6) ad Wednesday (4/8)
Content:
As a group we further discussed and planned the content we will include in our video presentation. We plan on incorporating our main insights and findings from our research to introduce and back up the changes we have made to the Facebook interface.
In addition, as a team we went over possible layout changes to our website to transform it into a promotional website. We agreed that the video should be the first thing people see on the homepage and discussed other changes to the site.
We also split up the report between our group and will begin to work on it over the weekend. Finally, mock ups are in the process of being made and will be implemented into our power point within the next few weeks.
Location: Discord
Length: 30 min
We revised our Gantt chart to remove the pitch video from the requirements and slightly adjust the weekly responsibilities breakdown. Based on what we talked about with the professor, we decided that our final deliverables will be:
| Final presentation slides |
| Interface Prototype Presentation |
| Video editing for the final presentation video |
| Final Project Report: |
| Research Analysis |
| User Impact Statement |
| Company value statement |
We also decided that anyone not working directly on the interface will be responsible for the slides. The interface slides themselves will be done the earlier half of the last two weeks since we want screenshots of our interview to work.
We also revised the site a little to have a page where we could present our work and design changes.
Location: Discord
Length: 1 hours
We created a Gantt Chart. We broke down the weekly responsibilities for each person for the last several weeks. We split up the final deliverables into estimated sections, then estimated the time needed for them.
Gantt Chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kJrN0U7JwKuRK2Fz30ZIC55JMuOjaaqRvuZQJjLH_wc/edit?usp=sharing
Location: Online
Length: 1-1.5 hours, scattered
Nick and Max Finalized the survey, sent it out, and are now waiting for an acceptable amount of respondents.
We think that 1 & 2 will tell us what person we’re dealing with, 3 & 4 will tell us if they are aware about ad preferences, 5 & 6 gives us feedback with developing our features.
Full Survey Link: https://forms.gle/DZeBy6SmikB9sKoU7
Survey Data Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xXA7ei_ACgBZJ4MrrHkIpYvwuAqdieDl3G3c-2CXst4/edit?usp=sharing
We also discussed UI for how we could make sponsored posts more visible and encourage interaction with ads preferences settings. Our figma board is here: https://www.figma.com/file/TzEaOHefAshyiNubQVhXpS/Search-Baron-UI-Late-March
Location: Virtual (Discord)
Length: 1 hour
We broke down the different aspects of Milestone 2. We figured out the steps we need to take, and started distributing these tasks to group members.
We started making plans for redesigning the UI. We found specific groups of people to test our new UI on.
Notes available: here.
Location: Virtual (Discord)
Length: 1 hour
We set up more communication channels and reviewed what we planned to do and discussed in previous meetings. We also talked about consolidating Facebook’s privacy settings page to not exist both in account settings and as a separate menu under the settings menu. One solution proposed was to link one to the other, and make sure all places linked consistently to that one place.
We also talked about the possibility of sending users a “Privacy Checkup email” every year to remind users to check up on their ad preferences and make sure they were set to the ones they wanted.
Notes available: here.
Milestone 1 Link: https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3Acb2cf1a0-3987-423c-beb1-19cc9b0e11cf
Milestone 2 Link: https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A972756fb-ce02-42ca-b699-8df7f242f812
Mission Statement:
Our mission is simple: to make ad settings more transparent and accessible to everyone regardless of their age, education, or level of tech wizardry. We plan to accomplish this by redesigning the ad preferences page of Facebook to be more informative and user-friendly, while helping our users understand how their choices affect their Facebook experience every step of the way. In doing so, we hope to improve the relationship between Facebook and its users– past, current, and future.
Goals:
Background and Context:
There is huge variation in how people approach privacy. Different people have many various backgrounds – people have different social, religious, and educational environments, which can affect their opinions on privacy. This, combined with the different levels of technological competency people have, affects how much effort they are willing to put in to change their ad preferences. For example, a person living under a government that knows everything about its people are used to having little privacy, making them less likely to put any effort into changing privacy settings that are even slightly difficult to access. As per Professor Yao, “It is clear that a normative approach to privacy, relying heavily on social norms and legal traditions, is ineffective when dealing with online privacy threats faced by netizens of the digital world. Internet users would not be able to rely on legal systems to protect their personal privacy, nor could they expect the other users to observe the social and cultural norms of their own.” In addition, according to Iowa State University, “The Namibian participants’ attitudes are reflective of Ubuntu, a widely held African philosophy, which focuses on humanness and togetherness.“. The tightly-knit culture makes people more open, which leads to Nambidian users posting more information about themselves and friending more strangers: “79% of Namibians reported friending strangers while 56% of US”. These people are more susceptible to ad targeting due to the amount of information available on them and can be more accepting of having reduced privacy. The separation between legal limits and the variety of societal limits on a per-person basis is very wide, so it is important to make ad settings more accessible to users to make the choice for themselves.
A specific example of how different social groups and ages view their privacy, or in the case of older generations don’t consider it at all, is how in recent years many young people have been leaving the Facebook platform. This trend is very ironic considering that Facebook was originally created for college students, but nonetheless teenagers and college students alike have not been spending nearly as much time on the platform as they used to, and some have abandoned it all together. According to theguardian.com, “Facebook is for old(er) people. Teens and young adults are ditching Mark Zuckerberg’s social network as popularity among the over-55s surges.” If you asked younger people today who uses Facebook, many would give a similar answer that they haven’t used Facebook in a while, and that the only people they know that do are their parents. Our team found this trend important regarding our project in the sense that older generations are even more prone to not understanding how their data is being used for advertisers to target them. This trend reinforces the importance of our project, it is crucial that Facebook users of all ages understand how and why they use your data and activity to advertise to them, and the control they have over certain aspects.
No matter how good our advertising is, or how intimately it knows our users, Facebook can’t turn a profit if nobody is clicking on those ads. This line of reasoning leads us to think that it’s not necessarily how much information you have on a person that counts, but rather the quality of that information, and marketability of that information. According to a study by Laura F. Bright and Terry Daugherty, allowing users a greater degree of customization of what ads they are and aren’t shown helps click-through rates for those ads. Users want to have control over their settings and when they have that control (or feel that they have that control), have “greater behavioral intention for interacting with advertising”. If we utilize that on Facebook’s platform, we can create a more highly valued ad platform as users would interact with the ads more, and overall increasing the revenue of Facebook as company. Given that targeted, highly personal ads only generate 4% more revenue than classic ads (source), it makes no sense for Facebook to continue to use valuable server space to continue aggregating this wealth of data if it ends up making users feel that their privacy is invaded and turns public opinion against them, all for a 4% increase in revenue. Facebook can kill two birds with one stone, increase user trust while also increasing ad click-through (thus increasing revenue), by having easier to use customization of ad and privacy settings.
Within the political and legal realm, advertising and privacy is a popular topic. Facebook’s CEO testifying in front of Congress was a big step in getting the general public to pay attention to their privacy. But lawmakers have been paying attention for a long time and they’ve been passing laws to regulate the accessibility of users’ data. Looking at the American Advertising Federation’s website you can see all of the legislative steps that have been taken throughout the years to help protect the general population. For example, in 2019, the Do Not Track bill was passed which allows users to opt-out of companies collecting data that is not important to their provided service. This is just one of dozens of bills that are passed every year that impact the advertising industry. This project has the potential to help Facebook stay within legal boundaries while helping them maintain a good business relationship with their advertisers.
Research Plan:
In order for our team to better understand our target audiences’ concerns and current feelings towards Facebook as a brand, we have created a research plan consisting of three different research methods that will better allow us to move forward with our re-design, focusing on human interaction and accessibility. Early on as a group we agreed that it is crucial for us to see how aware regular people are when it comes to Facebook’s ad preference page, if at all, and to gauge their understanding of the Facebook cookie and how they track/use their data. With this being said, we want to see how these consumers interact with Facebook’s ad preference as they currently stand before we make any changes. This way, we can make appropriate changes and adjustments based on the observations we have made.
As instructed, we picked 3 different research methods from the 3 human-centered design categories from the design thinking workbook. The first method we chose is the Fly-on-the-Wall method, this is a perfect option for us due to the fact that it allows our team to observe how someone might navigate and change their ad preferences without any outside help or alteration. As mentioned before, we plan on observing how consumers interact with the ad preferences menu as it stands, but also how they interact with it after we have implemented our own changes. Specifically, we will focus on things such as how long it takes for someone to update their preferences, which menus they click on first and for how long etc. We will be able to do this passively by recording their screens. From the participatory category, we decided to use the journaling and documenting method, that way we can truly understand what consumers internally think about Facebook and their ad preferences. We plan to give some people within our target audience a day to explore the ad preferences menu, and write down their opinions on the set up. Enabling us to see what an average consumer thinks about the process and hopefully learn what they do and do not like about it. Lastly, within the evaluative category, we will be creating a system usability scale to gauge how consumers would rate Facebook’s current Ad preference menu. We will create a qualtrics survey that asks the respondents how they feel regarding each section of the ad preferences menu, and how they rate it’s overall feasibility and design. Utilizing these three methods will give us very important information and insights to keep in mind when it comes to designing our own human-centred alterations to Facebook’s Ad preference menu.
Search Baron