"We Wanted to Do Better Than the Law": Exploring UI/UX Designers' Privacy Advocacy in Practice

2026-04-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the underexplored role of UI/UX designers in organizational privacy practices, a dimension often overlooked in favor of developer-centric approaches. Through semi-structured interviews with twelve privacy-advocating UI/UX designers and subsequent thematic analysis, the research systematically investigates their privacy-related perceptions, influencing factors, cross-functional collaboration challenges, and coping strategies. It reveals, for the first time, how designers navigate tensions among business objectives, technical constraints, and team dynamics through value-driven and adaptive approaches. The study identifies how individual characteristics and organizational contexts shape privacy advocacy, elucidates mechanisms of friction in interdisciplinary collaboration, and proposes designer-centered pathways for organizational change alongside actionable tooling recommendations. These findings offer both theoretical insights and practical foundations for fostering privacy-supportive design ecosystems.

Abstract

Designers hold primary responsibility for shaping the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of a product. This role goes beyond aesthetics and usability, extending to the privacy outcomes of user experience, which often emerge through collaboration with other stakeholders such as developers, product managers, and marketing teams. Previous studies on enhancing privacy for technological products primarily focused on the roles of developers -- understanding their needs and challenges -- but limited effort is devoted to examining how UI/UX designers consider and approach privacy in their work. Through 12 semi-structured interviews with privacy-advocating UI/UX designers, we explore the perceptions, influencing factors, challenges, and adaptive methods they use regarding privacy implementation. We pay special attention to how these challenges and adaptations play out in team-based settings where decisions are negotiated together. Our study reveals how personal and contextual factors shape designers' value of privacy, the collaborative nature of the challenges designers face when trying to prioritize privacy, and how they navigate tensions between business goals, team dynamics, and technical development. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for advocating a user-centered approach for supporting privacy-aware design, suggestions for organizational-level changes and bridging knowledge gaps through designer-centric tools and community building.

Problem

• UI/UX designers
• privacy advocacy
• collaborative design
• privacy challenges
• user-centered privacy

Innovation

• privacy advocacy
• UI/UX design
• collaborative design
• user-centered privacy
• designer agency