Our lives heavily depend on social platforms and services that even when the companies behind these products betray our trust, we shrug in discontent and keep using them anyway because they add value to our lives. Looks like we cannot do anything about the bad stuff right? Wrong, here is my proposed improvements with a 70% success rate for Google Account to demonstrate restating trust is possible.
In October 8 of 2018, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Ben Smith published an article in Keyword, a blogging platform for Google employees. In his piece, he talks about Project Strobe, a project that aims to protect user data and eliminate Google+. In the article he states:
“We discovered and immediately patched the bug in March 2018.” - Ben Smith
This is concerning because it means Google kept this breach secret. A breach that compromised over 500,000 user data, some potentially sensitive and private. Through a channel-company blog- no normal users visit, none the less.
Context timeline showing Google's late response and important milestones.
Research process was conducted in two phases; the primary research focusing on the more broader topic, State of Trust in Tech and the secondary research on Google Account after refining thoughts. In between those phases, I conducted interviews with a variety of users, creating a Persona Spectrum to catch the reactions of people with different lives with the same set of questions.
Who needs trust? - Persona spectrum for the interviews is established to represent the wide variety of people using social media.
"I don't trust tech companies because I cannot rely on them anymore. There is no accountability." - Diego Sr.
The deep dive research and interviews led me to realize, users are concerned about the breaches and their data being used but not enough to go extra mile. In an ideal world, I would work towards changing this behavior. However for the purposes of this case study, I decided to take on an existing solution and make it better.
Google Account was released to public around the same the Project Strobe article was published, June 2018. It is your account with access, authentication and authorization for some of the Google services you use.
Google Account landing page displayed on tablet mockup
While Google Account is a good step forward, it has a major flaw. It does not fully answer users concerns and questions. Research revealed that different Google services which can answer these concerns of the users was not connected to Google Account website.