Making Security a Priority in Your Digital Product Design Process

Angela Huang
DesignApes
Published in
5 min readJan 25, 2023

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Privacy practices in design is more important than ever, and every business needs to ensure its products are designed to protect the user’s privacy. If they don’t, users will not trust the product and will not want to use it, as it could leak important information about them.

Privacy is a broad topic, and it has different requirements worldwide. Certain countries require products to have more privacy than other countries do. Your product must meet all of these requirements if you want everyone to access it.

Photo by Dan Nelson on Unsplash

If you need to learn more about privacy choices, we are here to help you. We’re going to look at how you can make meaningful design choices in your product to help protect the privacy of users.

How To Make Meaningful Design Choices To Protect The Privacy Of Users

If you want to design your product to protect users’ privacy, then you need to know about these design choices and how you can add them to your product’s design.

If you need more help adding these to your product, you can hire a UX consulting firm and use their UI/UX design services. You can also look at how your competitors and other businesses used these design choices; you can do this before deciding to hire any firms.

Having Privacy As The Default

This is a great way to protect the privacy of your product’s users. Privacy, as the default, is about collecting the least amount of information possible. Collecting it is a waste of resources if you don’t need it. You should identify what information is important and then only collect that.

Don’t think about what information you might need in the future. If you need to collect more in the future, you can start doing that. If you need help identifying what is essential to collect, hire a UX consulting firm to help you find the right answers.

When collecting consumer information, you should have processes in place that will tell you how long the data will be kept, how it will be used, and when the data will be anonymized or deleted. All of this information should be included in your privacy policy so users of your product know it and don’t need to contact you to find out.

User data should only be handled by those who need to see it. Everyone else should not have access to all this information about the users. This will help reduce the risks of a data breach that could result in users’ information being leaked or held for ransom.

Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

Being Proactive When Dealing With User’s Privacy

It would help if you understood how user data would be used when you start designing the product. It would help if you did not leave this until the end; it is too important to do. Think about how the data will be handled, what will be done to reduce risks, and what steps need to be taken to protect users. All of this should be thought about before you start designing.

If you need to gain the knowledge or experience to do this, you can hire professionals to help you. Look for UX consulting firms that offer the right UI/UX design products and services to help you do this quickly and effectively. Before you hire any firm, you need to make sure it’s the right choice. Ask all of the questions you have, find out if they are great to work with by talking to their previous clients, and ask about what they’ve worked on before. Talk to different firms and choose the best one for your business and product.

Be Transparent

This will make it easier for people to trust how their data will be used. The GDPR tells you what to do when creating your privacy policy and the processes for how user data will be used.

To follow the GDPR, you need to make sure you communicate.

  • The reason for the data collection
  • The legal basis for the processing of data
  • Who will the data be shared with
  • Your contact details and the contact details of your data protection officer
  • How long will the data be kept for
  • The rights of the subject under the GDPR
  • If the data will be transferred to non-European countries, and what safeguards are in place if you do
  • If automated decision-making is used with the collected data
  • If the user is legally or contractually required to supply data and what happens if they were to refuse?
Photo by Franck on Unsplash

Securing User Data

You need to make sure the user’s personal information is secure from the instant they send the data to you by filling in a form or by any other method your product uses. This needs to be the case from the moment they send you the data to the point when the data is deleted.

You need to ensure the data is encrypted everywhere it can be; this data should then be monitored to quickly find any data breaches and stop them before any data is lost. There are different ways to secure data; encryption is one of many ways. You need to ensure that only certain people have access to the data and that the right restrictions are in place to prevent data breaches.

All of this needs to be decided before you start designing your product. This information then needs to be included in your privacy policy so everyone knows how their personal information will be used and what they can do to learn more about the processes that have been created. You need to update this information whenever any changes to how data is handled.

When creating the privacy policy, you should ensure it’s easy to understand and doesn’t confuse users. If users can easily understand this information, they will be more likely to trust your product.

Thanks for reading!

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