Team
Xueyun Tang (UX Designer)
Kate (Font-end Dev)
Mark (Co-founder & back-end Dev)
Richard (Co-founder & back-end Dev)
Company
Consentify (B2B), (SaaS)
Time
Apr 2023 - Jun 2023
(3 months: end-to-end design)
ROle
UX Researcher,
UX Designer
Consentify is a B2B (SaaS) platform that simplifies managing user consent data for organizations. We help organization to securely collect, manage, and record their customer consent, and help businesses use customer data responsibly while staying compliant and reducing legal risks.
My role
I led the recent upgrade of Consentify's platform, partnering closely with our developers and co-founders. This project was
launched successfully in September 2023. I revamped the information architecture, resulting an increase of task completion rate of 95%.
Demo request:
https://www.consentify.io/
00. Introduction to Consent Collection Process
Consent refers to permission granted by users for organizations to collect and use their personal data in specific ways. To collect and record user consent, business owners first design a consent collection form. This outlines what user data is needed and how it will be used. Once consent is obtained, the organization must track and store user consent choices, enable modifications, and allow withdrawal of consent.
Our company works with two main types of consent forms:
1. Data use purpose consent form - Request consent for specific data usage like "sharing" or "analyzing".
2. Subscription consent form - Request consent to provide services like sending job postings.
To create a consent form, users need to first define "purpose" or "subscription", which explain the specific data use intent or service subscription being consented to in the form (how it will be used). The consent form then indicates what user data is required, such as name, email address. It combines the pre-defined purpose or subscription with the requested data to outline everything needed for informed consent.
01. Define
The consent information is quite sensitive. Any slight modification to even a single character would require the customer to go through the re-signing process, potentially leading to customer complaints or even business losses. Any errors in this process could also result in serious legal repercussions for the company.
Initial user research, including interviews and task analysis, uncovered multiple issues that needed to be prioritized. To help the team determine priority, I created a matrix and discussed it with the founder. After reviewing the matrix, we decided to focus first on resolving the key problem "errors in designing consent forms." Optimizing consent form usability is an urgent need to minimize user mistakes.
02. Problem Analysis
We already know that users often make errors when designing and managing a consent form.
But WHY?
To understand the reasons behind it, we conducted 8 user interviews. Here is my research findings:
Problem 1:
Users have difficulty in the consent form creating process, and they may carelessly link wrong purposes or subscriptions.
Users don't know how to start and they have difficult locating what they want. During the consent form design process, user errors in selecting and linking data purposes or subscriptions often stem from carelessness or lack of thorough review:
1. Users may hastily select the wrong purpose or subscription from the available options without carefully verifying it is the intended one.
2. Users may neglect to check that the selected purpose or subscription does not contain typos or other erroneous information before linking it.
Errors from rushed or unverified selection of purposes and subscriptions result in the publication of inaccurate consent forms.
Problem 2:
Published consent forms can be accidentally modified.
Even minor edits to punctuation or wording by colleagues can trigger a new version that requires all users to re-sign the updated form. When you edit a form and save it, the new form will be automatically published and all users will need to re-sign.
Problem 3:
Modifying purpose or subscription could inadvertently lead to changes across multiple consent forms.
Changes to reusable sub-components like data use purposes can inadvertently impact published consent forms. Since purposes may be shared across multiple forms, edits to a purpose for one form may unintentionally modify other forms referencing the same purpose. This again leads to new versions being triggered and needing re-signing.
03. Goal
1. Increased task completion rate in usability testing.
2. Keep users informed of changes in real-time.
04. Ideation
To address the 3 key problems uncovered through initial research, I created multiple sketches and ideated solutions with the founder and engineering team. Through these ideation sessions, we agreed that changing the information architecture would be necessary, as task analysis revealed users struggled to locate needed information to complete consent forms. Users often needed multiple attempts to accomplish their goal.
We sketched some potential IA solutions and corresponding user flows. Then I created quick wireframes to test these ideas through further user research.
05. Design Process
Test:After proposing the first two solutions, we conducted user testing to evaluate if our solutions effectively resolved the problems. Through analyzing the test tasks, we discovered that problem 3 was not fully solved. Users may change a purpose to "draft" and edit it, without realizing this purpose is associated with other consent forms. The user testing revealed there is still a lack of awareness.
Solution1：(Solve problem 1)
Revise the sitemap - to make it easier to find the information for the consent forms.Based on the user testing result, I modified our information architecture into two main sections - a "Consent Center" and "Marketing Center." This consolidated all consent form fields into the Consent Center, eliminating the need for users to jump between different sections. Additionally, I combined related fields that were previously separate, further simplifying the process.
To reduce development time, we aimed to align the new design with the previous platform rather than completely redesigning it.
The revised information architecture helped solve the problem 1 "errors in the form design process" by aligning with users' mental models of where consent-related information should be located, thus reducing complexity in the form design workflow.
Test:After proposing the first two solutions, we conducted user testing to evaluate if our solutions effectively resolved the problems. Through analyzing the test tasks, we discovered that problem 3 was not fully solved. Users may change a purpose to "draft" and edit it, without realizing this purpose is associated with other consent forms. The user testing revealed there is still a lack of awareness.
Solution 2：(Solve problem 1 & 2 & 3)
Implement a status system for purpose, subscription, and consent form - to prevent consent forms from being mistakenly published or accidentally edited.Our analysis revealed that many errors occur because all forms(purpose, subscription, and consent forms) can be edited and automatically updated to a new version, even after publishing. This allows users to unintentionally modify published, in-use forms that are already in circulation.
To address this, I implemented a status system for subscriptions, data use purposes, and consent forms: Draft, Ready to Use, Active, and Expired. This will allow users to clearly see the status of an object before making edits, and prevent unintended changes to forms already in use.
With the status system, user will need to follow the new user flow.
How dose this user flow help to solve all the three problems?
Problem 1: "Users may carelessly link erroneous purposes or subscriptions when designing consent forms"
The "Ready to Use" status requires users to preview and explicitly set purposes and subscriptions as "Ready to Use" before publishing. This prevents users from accidentally selecting and publishing unfinished content.
Problem 2: "Published consent forms can be accidentally modified."
Only forms in "Draft" status are editable. Users cannot modify published forms marked as "Active", "Ready to Use", or "Expired". This prevents accidental changes to live consent forms that are already finalized and in use.
Problem 3: "Modifying purpose or subscription could inadvertently lead to changes across multiple consent forms."
Previously, users could directly edit in-use purposes when creating new consent forms, inadvertently changing other forms using the same purpose. However, users now have visibility into purpose status and must create new purposes to edit, avoiding accidental updates to other consent forms using the same active purpose.
Test:After proposing the first two solutions, we conducted user testing to evaluate if our solutions effectively resolved the problems. Through analyzing the test tasks, we discovered that problem 3 was not fully solved. Users may change a purpose to "draft" and edit it, without realizing this purpose is associated with other consent forms. The user testing revealed there is still a lack of awareness.
Test:After proposing the first two solutions, we conducted user testing to evaluate if our solutions effectively resolved the problems. Through analyzing the test tasks, we discovered that problem 3 was not fully solved. Users may change a purpose to "draft" and edit it, without realizing this purpose is associated with other consent forms. The user testing revealed there is still a lack of awareness.
Solution 3:
Provide timely notification - to reinforce user's awareness.
As outlined in solution two, if a user tries to edit the status of a purpose or subscription connected to a consent form currently in a "ready to use" state, the form will automatically be set to "draft". A pop-up window will notify the user that the associated consent form's status has been changed to "draft".
06. Wireframe iteration
Test:After proposing the first two solutions, we conducted user testing to evaluate if our solutions effectively resolved the problems. Through analyzing the test tasks, we discovered that problem 3 was not fully solved. Users may change a purpose to "draft" and edit it, without realizing this purpose is associated with other consent forms. The user testing revealed there is still a lack of awareness.
Purpose list page
1. Added status column and last modified date column to show current status and recent modifications for each item
2. Delayed filter from list page per discussion with dev team.
3. Displayed where "purpose" is in use. (e.g. "Used in job poster consent form")
After user testing
(Click image to zoom in)
Old design
Version 1
Version 2
Purpose details page
1. Converted the side open temporary page to a dedicated full page to help users stay focused.
2. Added status information and latest modification info.
3. Iterated on design details and page logic. (Converting the status toggle to a button; changing the subscription to an underlined link rather than having it as a tab on the purpose page; prominently displaying the status at the top of the page in a highlighted style to increase visibility; etc.)
After user testing
(Click image to zoom in)
Old design
Version 1
Version 2
07. Prototype
Flow 1: Create a subscription
Flow 2: Create a consent form
Flow 3: Revise a data use purpose
07. Prototype
User flow 1 : Create a new purpose/ subscription/ consent form
User flow 2 : Edit a published consent form
User flow 2 : Edit a published consent form
07. Evaluation
After the revision, we received positive feedback from the user tests. Based on our usability test results, the task success rate improved significantly, rising from 52% to 83%.
