Nodi - Inclusive Design for Informed Consent

Let's iteratively design consent interfaces that are understandable by adults in the developing world, including non-literates with limited tech access.

Our team has been highly involved in drafting a set of smartphone interface guidelines for India's upcoming Privacy Bill (i.e. we drafted iSpirt's response to the Privacy Bill). These user interface guidelines attempt to make complex concepts like digital privacy rights and consent artifacts that are understandable to Indian smartphone users.  Little rigorous work has been done worldwide to demonstrate that most adults can understand digital consent interfaces well enough to give informed consent, especially for marginalized adults, who are often rural, have limited literacy skills, lack access to data networks and smartphones and rely on agents or other parties to operate their devices on their behalf.

This proposal seeks to improve (and broaden) our user interface guidelines through a series of focus groups and usability tests. At the end of our process, we expect to have a much improved and field-tested set of guidelines to recommend to other digital identity system designers, including how to incorporate storytelling into the interface, multi-lingual guidelines and audio/text-free best practices.

Most practitioners in the domain of digital identity focus on technical components of how to provide robust and secure digital identity systems; we take a different approach with the assumption that those technical challenges will be solved by others. We choose to focus on the design and user comprehension challenges digital identity systems present to users. Just as the US's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau researched and ultimately published design guidelines to credit card providers to enhance user understanding of financial contracts, we seek to provide a set of guidelines and user research to digital consent providers.

We are not providing a technical solution per se, but hope to confidently advocate a set of design guidelines that will enable users to understand their privacy rights and obligations.

As you'll see in our guidelines, we also hope to extend the conversation to push the ecosystem to create "Private by Default" solutions. E.g. We envision users being able to share their ratings of both privacy intermediaries and private data consumers, thereby creating incentives for "good behavior" in the system and informing other users of their positive and negative experiences in an AppStore-like environment.

Our first customer of these user guidelines are the Account Aggregators of India, who the Privacy Bill envisions will act as personal data intermediaries for all Indians' financial data. We expect to see this model copied in practice and in law in other countries in the years to come.

We expect that the iterative design and user insights we glean through our focus groups to be relevant to a broad set of digital Identity providers worldwide. It is of particular interest for us to leverage the digital consent design lessons we learn in India to a worldwide audience and hope this challenge can help us spread this learning to relevant policy makers and practitioners in other countries.

We see "users" being two groups here:

1. "Users" as digital Identity system designers. For this group, we'll publish our smartphone and "dumb" phone design findings, key user insights and importantly what designs worked well and failed in our tests.

2. "Users" as policy makers creating legal frameworks for digital ID systems. For this group, we'll discuss how we believe lawmakers should be prescriptive enough to push digital Identity system makers to make systems are hopefully universally understood and yet allow for local innovations and an evolving set of design patterns.

Given our final artifact is a set of design guidelines, we do not find "lock-in" being relevant here. 

Designing for often marginalized and ignored users is at the heart of this proposal. We envision 7 design iterations/focus groups:

1. Urban, low income short-term intra-country migrants (e.g. guards, waiters, construction workers), representing 150m in India

2. Rural farmers - about 600m

3. Global middle class achievers - about 30m

4. Established low income, urban slum dwellers - about 100m

5. Elderly vs young users

6. Smartphone vs non-smartphone access

7. Assisted scenarios & self-help groups - how do we expect existing microfinance self-help groups to use digital consent interfaces collectively? E.g. if one person applies for a loan, how might the group guide her through giving consent?

Assuming the Indian Privacy Bill passes, these interfaces will be required for any Indian to apply for a loan or conduct any sanctioned financial transaction that needs their personal data.  Similarly, laws like Europe's GDPR are being considered in virtually every country. Hence, we believe that enhancing the end-user focused design of these systems is of incredibly importance. We leverage this challenge as the beginning of a global design conversation to improve the systems for all people to truly informed consent everywhere.

We work with iSpirt.IN, the non-profit think-tank that spearheaded India's Aadhaar system, UPI and India Stack, as volunteers. We also run Jaaga.in, an NGO focused on community design research and technology. For this project, we'll also partner with other design institutions such as Microsoft Research India, Wadhwani AI and digital consent providers such as India's Account Aggregators (e.g. Finvu.in, Onemoney.in) and Facebook (given their expertise in building privacy interfaces).

Sean Blagsvedt: Head of PM, Microsoft Research India; CEO & Founder, Babajob.com; Head of Int'l Growth, Marco Polo. Babajob.com focused on connecting Indian informal sector workers (cook, maids, drivers) to better jobs via voice-only, SMS and mobile interfaces. It had 9 million users, processed over 500,000 job applications a month and was sold to quikr.com in 2017.

Archana Prasad (archanaprasad.com) - Founder-Director, Jaaga.in; Design Researcher, Microsoft Research. Notable community-focused design research:  text-free communication products for non-literate users (Vivote Mail); Malleshwaram Calling, voice-only interface to community stories from elderly populations.

We see our work as providing design best practices for the industry and public sector. Hence, our long term sustainability lies in industry, government and philanthropic grants. 

Rigorous work needed to build well-designed interfaces for marginalized users does not have great market potential and is thus sidelined. In the years to come, the guidelines we develop will hopefully positively influence some of the most important interfaces of our lives. But it is not clear how this work is profitable in the short term to many of the players in this system. Hence, we believe public funding of the work is appropriate. Furthermore, we believe that the convening power of the World Bank could be a catalyst to start a serious design conversation in the digital consent space.

Great interface guidelines require: 1. Relevance and buy-in from practitioners e.g. digital identity system designers like the Account Aggregators of India. This is generally gained from deep engagement and understanding of their needs and constraints

2. Great user-researchers

3. Well structured visits and focus groups from representative samples of user populations

4. Great designers

We need resources to recruit and pay staff for all these activities. Furthermore, once the work is done, we must actively proselytize it. This challenge will provide the initial funding needed, as well as the platform to publish findings from six to seven design iterations.