Privacy Starts with UI: Privacy Patterns and Designer Perspectives in UI/UX Practice
Anxhela Maloku, Alexandra Klymenko, Stephen Meisenbacher, Florian Matthes
TL;DR
This paper investigates privacy in UI/UX design, addressing the lack of systematic guidance for designers. It employs a three-part qualitative approach—systematic literature review, 15 semi-structured interviews with UI/UX practitioners, and artifact creation/evaluation—to produce a UI/UX Privacy Pattern Catalog and an accompanying Figma library. The authors identify 14 privacy considerations and 14 influencing factors, organizing them into actionable design guidance, validated through two workshops and an online survey. The work demonstrates that privacy in UI/UX starts at the interface, while also underscoring organizational, cultural, regulatory, and tooling factors that affect practical implementation, thus offering practitioner-ready artifacts to promote privacy-preserving UI/UX design.
Abstract
In the study of Human-Computer Interaction, privacy is often seen as a core issue, and it has been explored directly in connection with User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) design. We systematically investigate the key considerations and factors for privacy in UI/UX, drawing upon the extant literature and 15 semi-structured interviews with experts working in the field. These insights lead to the synthesis of 14 primary design considerations for privacy in UI/UX, as well as 14 key factors under four main axes affecting privacy work therein. From these findings, we produce our main research artifact, a UI/UX Privacy Pattern Catalog, which we validate in a series of two interactive workshops and one online survey with UI/UX practitioners. Our work not only systematizes a field growing in both attention and importance, but it also provides an actionable and expert-validated artifact to guide UI/UX designers in realizing privacy-preserving UI/UX design.