Co-designing the user experience and interaction of an employee MyData service

Abstract

Personal data privacy is a crucial and timely issue as we live in a post-GDPR world where individuals have rights over their data. Many companies have now adapted to allow users to see and control how their data is used. The MyData Global initiative has been working for years to encourage and promote this. However, what has largely been ignored is the employment context. Given the rise of big data and AI - new ways to gather data are becoming increasingly common but these cannot be adopted without a regard to privacy. This conversation is important as the future of work is increasingly based on digital analytics and learning based on organisational data.

This is where this thesis comes in – to find the best approach to creating transparency and providing data rights to employees in the context of a Finnish technology consultancy. It includes a literature review looking at the various components of this discourse – legal perspectives, employee data usage, organisational trust, designing transparency and privacy by design with a focus on collaborative design methodology. The main research then focuses on how might we design trust, specifically how can we measure and enhance transparency and control for employees in a technology consultancy and explain the value of data through a digital service. It shows how a collaborative design methodology was utilised to design this service with each method informing and defining the requirements for the next. The user research includes a survey and co-creative interviews with employees around data usage awareness. This led to creation of mock-ups that were evaluated in workshop sessions with employees from where an interactive prototype of a digital service was created. The prototype reflects what data sources are present in the organisation – some of which belong to employees – as well as which applications are using that data. This prototype is then tested with employees to understand how effective it is in enhancing transparency, providing agency and explaining the value to employees with respect to usability.

The main results include a positive correlation between this process and enhanced transparency and control over data among employees. There was high awareness found among employees when it came to how their data was used and their involvement in this process helped highlight the need for collaborative processes for data privacy related work in technology. A framework created to map data sensitivity for new data applications is also a useful outcome that can be improved further but is a starting point for data-driven teams to follow privacy by design principles. Lastly, a validated UI model is also presented for future MyData services and the important elements of it are explained and justified. There is also some consideration for limitations and recommendations for future work are provided as this is not a large niche of research and there are many areas that can be explored next.