THE LIMITS OF YOUR PRIVACY — Dominika Swierad Portfolio Site

ABOUT ME

Dominika Świerad

LinkedIn

I bring research, innovation and experience design together, helping teams build products that are useful, thoughtful and fun. Right now I'm part of the AI Labs team at On, where we're working to bring people more joy through movement. I've worked across sectors, with a particular passion for media and storytelling, my time at the Financial Times and building the Guardian's Feast being the highlights.

After hours I write a newsletter about metropolitan life and culture.

CV

THE LIMITS OF YOUR PRIVACYUSER RESEARCH, AMBIGUITY, SENSITIVE TOPICS

BACK

I WORKED AS

RESEARCHER AND DESIGNER

METHODS AND TECHNIQUES
 Ethnography and user interviews
 Collaborative workshops
 Artefacts based research

TECHNOLOGIES
 Adobe CC and carpentry tools for artefact design

BIGGEST CHALLENGES THAT WE’VE OVERCOME
 Enabling the participants to comfortably share sensitive information

DESCRIPTION

To support a project for the Royal Bank of Scotland our aim was to get to the core of how people feel about their data being used, exposed and stored. This happened several months before the GDPR e-mails flooded our inboxes and media coverage around the issue got denser. We've chosen to interview representatives from all spectrums of digital literacy, from a retired teacher living on a remote island, through an investigative librarian working with confidential documents to a tech-savvy teenager.

We designed and produced artefacts embodying different attitudes to personal data, transparency, security and UX to help us talk to people about abstract and personal issues in a more comfortable, communicative way.

First activity asked participants, who were given five cards with scenarios and different reaction options below, to select one that would most align with them. It was designed to help us understand the tipping point between personal gain, willingness to help vs privacy and security.

Second activity asked participants to indicate the extent of their willingness to share types of personal data with third parties.It was designed to show the levels of trust in different institutions and gain an understanding of the level of trust in the bank (the client). The interfaces were representing - a bank, the government, NHS, a hardware company and a software company.

Third activity focused on interacting with three artefacts embodying different attitudes to personal data, transparency, security and UX. It was designed to explore people´s attitude towards digital/physical interactions with their personal data, and to identify strong and weak points. Each artefact showed a diverse quantity of data through different materials and forms of interaction ranging from simple and familiar to complex.