TABLE OF CONTENTS
Overview
Highlights
Context
Problem Space
Interviews
Design Audit
Synthesis & Ideation
Solution Spaces
Space 1: Top Nav
Space 2: Sidepanel
Space 3: Cards
Validation
Reflection

Meta's Privacy Incident Manager

Empowering Meta’s Privacy Team to remediate privacy incidents present on Meta's digital ecosystem of products.
My Role
Product Design Lead
Timeline
Jun - Sep 2022
Team
Meta Infrastructure, Enterprise
Privacy Team
Skills
Product Thinking
Interaction Design
Visual Design
User Research

OVERVIEW

How Meta remediates privacy incidents.

For years, Meta has been central to privacy and social media discussions. With over 3.74 billion monthly users, privacy incidents are inevitable across Meta’s digital products.

To address this, Meta created the Privacy Incident Manager, empowering the Privacy team to understand, resolve, and plan for each incident.

However, the current tool falls short in helping users efficiently handle incidents, particularly on the entry dashboard.

I led the design direction for revitalizing the entry experience to enable users with the right information and necessary tools to efficiently remediate an incident. 

Take action against a privacy incident.

Directly access global actions for the incident through a convenient top navigation toolbar.

Find incident information, faster.

Easily access crucial incident details via a convenient right-hand side rail throughout the Privacy Incident Manager.

Stay up-to-date on remediation progress.

Understand a privacy incident faster with important remediation updates and status changes.

PROJECT CONTEXT

The Privacy Incident Manager helps the Privacy team1 remediate privacy incidents...

...but it can not do so with an entry dashboard riddled with features that are barely used.

1The Privacy team–consisting of lawyers, privacy managers, and investigators–uses the Incident Manager daily to swiftly address any privacy incidents they encounter.
The Privacy Incident Manager before my project.

THE PROBLEM AT HAND

How might we enhance the entry dashboard to align with user workflows that remediate privacy incidents?

While the Privacy Incident Manager has run for years, features and pages were never re-visited until H1 of 2022, such as the entry dashboard. Prior to my own investigation and research of the tool, users were often frustrated with the entry dashboard’s lack of navigability and unclear remediation steps.

Users would ignore the dashboard and navigate to other pages.

USER INTERVIEWS SUMMARY

What's the user sentiment for the entry dashboard?

Clear signs of indifference.

While interviewing 10 primary users, I noticed a common theme; indifference to the current experience. 
5/6
of participants completely disregarded the dashboard.

Overwhelming & Underwhelming.

The dashboard showed a disproportionate amount of information that users found overwhelming and underwhelming.
Overwhelming – History Page
Most users disregarded the history page because of the amount of information presented.
Underwhelming – Incident Status
Features like the Incident Status card showed little to no beneficial information for a user’s day-to-day workflow.

Creating metrics for my project.

In addition to these findings, I also asked two quantitative questions to serve as my metric guidelines for my project.
On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied are you with the dashboard?
1 = very unsatisfied; 5 = very satisfied
On a scale of 1-5, how usable is the dashboard for you?
1 = not very usable; 5 = very usable
‍What About Other Metrics?: At first, I wanted to use heat mapping and other quantitative metrics to understand user engagement with dashboard features. But after talking to data scientists and reviewing my project timeline, I realized that resource limitations made this approach unrealistic.

AUDITING THE CURRENT EXPERIENCE

What does the current experience look like?

Uncovering heuristic and usability gaps.

To continue with this project, I believed it was critical for me to understand the Privacy Incident Manager from its current experience via a heuristic evaluation. 
I used heuristic evaluation guidelines crafted by designers on Meta’s Infrastructure team – ensuring I identify heuristic and usability areas of improvement.

Prone to errors.

‍For example: users can select between four severity levels for an incident.

The last two, high and urgent, were coded the same; leading users to misinterpret severity levels.

Unrecognizable visual patterns.

For example: the Privacy Incident Manager contained outdated visual elements (icons/glyphs).

These would clash with users' mental models outlined by the current privacy design system.

SYNTHESIS & IDEATION

Turning our insights into high-level project goals and ideas.

Crafting the project's trajectory through principle.

Synthesizing our research insights, we had identified two main problem areas which ultimately became the guiding principles for our design explorations:
Usability
Our designs should empower users to take action in order to improve their task efficiency.
Navigability
The entry dashboard should have clear navigation points and next step opportunities.

Thinking of "outside-the-box" ideas.

Ideating through design-thinking workshops.

We aimed to generate ideas by having 2 different design-thinking workshops. The first was all an empathy exploration workshop and the second was a crazy 8's workshop.

EMPATHY EXPLORATION

How do users want to feel when using our product?

We based the empathy exploration workshop based on the two principles we created: usability and navigability.

Our results were 4 sentiment areas that represent these principles in more detail.
Personalization
Customizable views for individuals and/or different user groups.
TL;DR
Users are busy! Users need to efficiently understand the situation at hand.
Newbies
Consider the experience for: day 1 users, year 1 ‘members’, and year 5 ‘veterans’.
Empower
The dashboard should provide means for users to take action ASAP.

CRAZY 8'S WORKSHOP

How can we turn our sentiment areas into realistic solutions?

During this workshop, everyone created 8 ideas in any of the 4 sentiment areas we found in the previous workshop.

Below you'll find the areas we narrowed down on based on an impact matrix and voting.

EMPOWER 1

Top Navigation

NEWBIES

Tooltips

EMPOWER 2

Sidepanel

SOLUTION SPACES

Divide and conquer.

After narrowing on a handful of ideas, I split up each idea into its own solution space. Below you will find the three main spaces and the iterative design process I went through for each.

SPACE 1

Consistent top navigation and toolbar

Before the redesign...

Research insights showed that the top navigation for the Privacy Incident Manager was widely inconsistent across the tool’s pages.
A majority of pages had very few features...
...while some pages had many features that impacted the entire incident.

An iterative process.

I had crafted a couple iterations that were iterated over time. I iterated based on: user feedback from testing and critiques from designers on the privacy team.

ITERATION 1

FOCUS AREAS

My first design exploration focused on: 
  1. Showing the ‘global’ actions users could take
  2. Adding visual pieces of information that users may find useful based on research insights 
  3. Updating the visual design of the top navigation with the Meta Infrastructure design system. 

AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT

I received cross-functional feedback that helped me understand some improvement areas:
  1. Think about edge-cases
  2. Profile icons on the right are not necessary

ITERATION 2

FOCUS AREAS

In my second iteration, I challenged myself to think of other visual elements users would find informative and any edge cases that might arise.
  1. Added incident severity tagging to show severity level of the incident
  2. Added a test incident toggle to allow cross-functional partners the option to toggle an incident as a test.

AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT

I presented this design to the entire privacy design team during a critique. Some feedback included:
  1. How can a user toggle incident severity?
  2. Think about your design intentionality

Final Design

I then iterated on my feedback to create my third and final iteration which was tested on users and garnered positive results.
Along with the main top navigation, I added secondary actions for pages that had actions relative to that page.

SPACE 2

An accessible right-hand sidepanel

Before the redesign...

In the current Privacy Incident Manager, a right-hand side rail on one page provided users access to dashboard info like History. Research revealed that components like team info from the dashboard were frequently referenced on other non-dashboard pages.

I wondered if, a consistent right-hand side rail throughout the Incident Manager could expedite users' access to crucial information.

After

In collaboration with another infrastructure designer, we had crafted a new right-hand side rail that shifted entry dashboard information to a more accessible area. 

SPACE 3

Entry dashboard cards

The creation of a consistent top navigation and right-hand side-rail moved integral features from the dashboard to features that are present in all screens; improving the accessibility of these features.

Before the redesign...

We had two problems that we aimed to solve with the redesign.

STAGE 1.A

Exploring different dashboard cards

Referring back to the ideation workshop, I brainstormed what the various ideas could look like when presented on the dashboard.

I had narrowed in on 6 different ideas that took form as widgets.

STAGE 1.B

Garnering user preferences

With my 6 explorations, I conducted a quick set of usability tests to gauge user preferences for the ideas.
Feature Preference Key
  • 3+ users preferred the feature
  • 1-2 users preferred the feature
  • 0 users preferred the feature
The feedback showed preferences for the: Summary, Recommended Next Steps, and Incident Update features.

STAGE 2

Creating the first high-fidelity mockup

The first iteration highlights two different dashboard cards: Summary and Incident Updates.
I had decided against the Recommended Next Steps feature because of its feasibility. Without any sort of recommendation model, I wouldn’t be able to realistically recommend next steps to users.

Usability testing feedback: lose the first card, keep the second.

After receiving feedback from users for my first iteration, it was clear that users liked the second card but preferred the first card to be how it was originally: showcasing steps of the entire incident process.

STAGE 3

Final Designs

With the feedback in-mind, my final designs focus on showcasing the status of the incident and incident updates for a user.

Card 1: Incident Status

Card 2: Incident Activity

NOTABLE CHANGES

Added activity tagsfor improved scannability
Added visual profiles for improved scannability of task ownership
Divided activity into the two most important pages for updates

Final Dashboard Design

Screen showing the two cards in conjunction with the entire dashboard redesign.

DESIGN VALIDATION

A final round of usability testing.

Remember those metrics before?

During my final round of testing, I asked the same qualitative metric questions and saw a general increase in both areas.
On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied are you with the dashboard?
1 = very unsatisfied; 5 = very satisfied
30% Increase
On a scale of 1-5, how usable is the dashboard for you?
1 = not very usable; 5 = very usable
18% Increase

Moving forward...

This last round validated my designs quantitatively and qualitatively (via user sentiment). From here, I began to wrap up my project:
Handed-Off
Designs were passed on to the engineering team for a projected release in H1 of 2023.
Recorded the big ideas.
“Big ideas” outside of project scope were documented and shared with the design team!

REFLECTION

An experience that solidified my passions for design.

Communicate, often.

It's vital to keep cross-functional partners in the loop at every stage of the design-process. Communicate with your manager often and lean on your team for support!‍

Deviation, in moderation.

Throughout my internship, I expanded and reframed the scope of my project. While unexpected at first, I learned to become flexible and ready for any project changes; finding confidence in my abilities as a product designer.

Simplicity is key!

Not everyone understands design terminology. Make sure everyone is on the same page with enhanced storytelling. In meetings, keep concepts simple so that they are easy to explain.

Be flexible and pivot!

Leading two projects in a 10-week timeframe can be a lot to juggle. During this experience, I learned to think of tradeoffs and balance: design explorations, technical constraints, and business needs often.

Thanks for reading! Looking for more?

Check out one of my other case studies...
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