Adjacent User

Adjacent User Privacy studies how secondary stakeholders’ privacy can be conserved through experience design.

My Role

UX Researcher
UX Designer
UI Designer

Team

UW DRG

Time

Win 2022 - Ongoing

Design Artifact

Speculative Design
Visual Iterations

Research

Workshop
Structured Interview

Ongoing

Pictorial

Background

Smart cameras affect other subjects along with owners who may concern their own privacy.  

Secondary users of such technology have very limited control over their own privacy either deliberately or non-deliberately.

Previous Work

Identifying the current privacy exacerbating situation brought forth by the prevalence of smart cameras, the study used principles of speculative design* to address some possible scenarios.

Some speculative ideas include guest access, do not face-track, neighborly settings, camera shields, still sensing reminder...

*Speculative design is a practice of design in which exaggerated ideas are produced to call out attention to specific needs. A set of speculative design defines a new design space.

James Pierce, Claire Weizenegger, Parag Nandi, Isha Agarwal, Gwenna Gram, Jade Hurrle, Hannah Liao, Betty Lo, Aaron Park, Aivy Phan, Mark Shumskiy, and Grace Sturlaugson. 2022. Addressing Adjacent Actor Privacy: Designing for Bystanders, Co-Users, and Surveilled Subjects of Smart Home Cameras. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 26–40. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3535195

Mission

With the design space defined from previous work, our main objective is to prototype some ideas and redistribute our thoughts to general public.

*Speculative design is a practice of design in which exaggerated ideas/concepts are produced to call out attention to specific needs. A set of speculative design defines a new design space.

UX Iterations

Camera Controls

To ensure an experience of users feeling in control of their own privacy, we want to give the controls of smart cameras back to users in a succinct and meaningful way.

We iterated on some significantly different styles.

Tap to Change Button

Pro:
Clean visual, no redundancy.
Single point of interaction means easy to remember, clear to signify.
Takes up less space

Con:
Only point of interaction is toggling, not as flexible.

Detailed Toggles

Pro:
Redundant signifiers.
Room for detail descriptions or additional states.
For sure visual for sure confirmation.

Con:
Takes up a lot of space.
Visually chunky when multiple cameras are in one screen.

Symbol Only Button

Pro:
Show, don't tell.
Focused and clean.

Con:
No other indication, textual explanations.
Not as flexible for experimental use.

Symbol Only Button (Variation)

Pro:
Other states could be added on the visual without changing much of the interface design.

Con:
No other indication, textual explanations.

Privacy Modes

While providing choices of privacy, we don't want to overwhelm users with the choices.

Thus we tailored modes that dictate camera behavior based on scenarios. Users can chose how private they wan the smart camera to be based on needs.

Standard Viewing

When no privacy feature is required, the security camera is default to the standard mode.

Medium Privacy

When users want a peace of mind while don't need to know all the details of the camera feed.

Medium privacy is the choice to blur unnecessary contents and allows un-blur if needed.

Strong Privacy

When privacy is restricted, however, the viewer still needs some insights.

Strong privacy mode provides a list of events without saving the recordings any where.

Settings

Being a major part of experience that could explain our concepts, we focused on making informative setting screens with appropriate UX copies(Rational + Understandable, Focused + Simple, Friendly + Trustworthy).

We want the settings be a place where users can go back to when they forget about some camera behaviors and feel informed while completing a setting.

Physical Indicator In App

As a holistic experience, app UI also need to connect with physical interface.

Concept Animations_01

We visualized complex feature concepts in dedicated screens.

Concept Animations_02

We visualized complex feature concepts in dedicated screens.

Direct feedback

Some behavior may be hard to convey only through text, we implemented direct visualization along with textual explanations.

Guest Access

One solution to respecting adjacent user privacy is to directly share with them what the owners can see.

The guest mode responds to situations such as Airbnb, having a babysitter, when you don't really want to turn off your camera but other people's privacy is at stake.

At a glance of who has access

As a holistic experience, app UI also need to connect with physical interface.

Sending an invitation

We visualized complex feature concepts in dedicated screens.

Guest end

Some behavior may be hard to convey only through text, we implemented direct visualization along with textual explanations.

Guest manual

Some behavior may be hard to convey only through text, we implemented direct visualization along with textual explanations.

UX Roadbumps

In medium privacy made, we explore different modals of un-blur action with emphasis on how hard it is to un-blur footage.

We want to make un-blurring possible but would take some effort to accomplish. Since privacy mode is chosen, users would need to put in effort to uphold their trust too.

Attention driven button

Video would only un-blur when the button is pressed. This way, un-blurring only happens when the user actively wants to view content

Unblur Toggle

Most basic form of control, this is the model we want to avoid.

Secondary menu

Un-blurring is hidden from regular user and could be found if user actively look for it. This design slow down the process of un-blurring and gives users time to consider.