Original title: "We Wanted to Do Better Than the Law": Exploring UI/UX Designers' Privacy Advocacy in Practice
Keyu Yao, Jinghui Cheng, Jin L. C. Guo · September 2026
Apps and websites often collect your personal data, and UI/UXThe visual design and overall feel of an app or website, including how easy it is to use. designers shape how you interact with those privacy choices. UI/UX design covers how a digital product looks and feels to use. Most past research looked only at software developers, ignoring the designers who build these experiences alongside product managers, marketers, and engineers. To change this, researchers interviewed designers who actively push for privacy. They examined what drives these designers, what stops them, and how they adapt their daily work. The researchers found that both personal beliefs and workplace settings affect how much designers value privacy. Designers face tough hurdles when collaborating with teammates, constantly balancing privacy against company business goals and technical limits. To help them succeed, the authors suggest creating designer-friendly tools, building supportive communities, and making organizational workplace changes.
Imagine you're in charge of cooking dinner for a group of friends. You want to make a healthy meal, but one friend insists on bringing chips, another wants to order pizza, and the host just wants everyone happy. You can control the salad, but the rest of the meal gets decided by the group. In this paper, the designer is the cook who cares about privacy, and the friends are the developers, managers, and marketers with their own priorities. The designer can shape what users see, but the final privacy decisions are negotiated at the table.
Privacy in apps and websites is shaped as much by design choices as by code. When designers are overruled by business goals, users end up with interfaces that nudge them toward sharing more than they intend. Supporting designers' privacy advocacy could make digital products respect people's boundaries by default.
The study is qualitative, based on 12 interviews, so findings are not statistically generalizable. It captures designers' reported experiences, not direct observation of their work. It does not evaluate whether specific privacy interventions succeed.
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"We Wanted to Do Better Than the Law": Exploring UI/UX Designers' Privacy Advocacy in Practice — Keyu Yao, Jinghui Cheng, Jin L. C. Guo — Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction — doi:10.1145/3817036
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.