Redesigning Privacy with User Feedback: The Case of Zoom Attendee Attention Tracking
Tony W Li, Arshia Arya, Haojian Jin · 2024
Software engineers’ unawareness of user feedback in earlier stages of design contributes to privacy issues in many products. Although extensive research exists on gathering and analyzing user feedback, there is limited understanding about how developers can integrate user feedback to improve product designs to better meet users’ privacy expectations. We use Zoom’s deprecated attendee attention tracking feature to explore issues with integrating user privacy feedback into software development, presenting public online critiques about this deprecated feature to 18 software engineers in semi-structured interviews and observing how they redesign this feature. Our results suggest that while integrating user feedback for privacy is potentially beneficial, it’s also fraught with challenges of polarized design suggestions, confirmation bias, and limited scope of perceived responsibility.