Planning Committee Member
pari passu, 2024 – 2025
Creator & Designer
Smeoow, 2021 – 2023
Artist Assistant
Depop, 2019 – 2020
Lead Campus Manager
Education Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design, MAY 2024
Cornish College of the Arts
Seattle, WA
Interaction Design
User Experience
- Synthesize user feedback on pain points and unmet needs to identify design opportunities
- Develop user-friendly design guidelines as industry recommendations
- Prototype a website to aid reading and comprehension of EULAs
Difficult by Design
It might not sound all that surprising, but results from my primary research show that five in five adults have “Accepted” a EULA without any plans to read it.
This is highly troubling especially when end-users say there are too many costly prerequisites for them to be able to fully read a EULA, such as mental capacity, legal education, and free time.
Only the Rich Read EULAs
Having the time to read a EULA might be the hardest flex ever? In their article, Kleiner and Pavalko argue that time poverty discriminately affects low-income households, leading to a host of social inequities and public health problems. Those in communities with less control over their time are likely to have to work more, leading to less time for exercise and, consequently, obesity, diabetes, and malnutrition.
Ask
how do different users interact with eulas? this query relates to several areas of focus:
- What does a user-friendly license agreement look like?
- How does human-centered design overlap with business development?
- How do dark UX patterns affect the design of EULAs?
- what do brands stand to gain from being accessible and transparent?
Prepare
Upon completion of the screener, discussion guide, and successfully recruiting participants by scattering fliers in Seattle’s ballard, capitol hill, fremont, and south lake union neighborhoods, I prepare to meet with each person for about 40 minutes.
participants are split into 3 groups based on familiarity with EULA conventions: low awareness, medium awareness, and high awareness. having each interacted with the same EULA sample (AirBnB), their user journey is documented using a combination of 4 methods: survey, observation, exploration, and interview.
Process
Once the interview transcripts have been analyzed, information is sorted into different themes. some valuable key points include:
- End-users are often deterred from engaging by time constraints, complexity, or inaccessibility
- Many end-users lack the incentive to read, thus assuming the eula contains standard terms
- Dark UX artificially creates pressure, commanding end-users to “Agree” before they can access a product
Analyze
as models of what to do and what to avoid, These websites help significantly in defining goals for pari passu.
each of them has a user flow that heavily leverages search engine and category features. Furthermore, their about page is placed in the footer alongside other legal information and resources. This tells me that it must be clear to the user what my website’s purpose is without requiring them to read a mission statement.
Share
I present my findings to 3 different rounds of panels with Cornish faculty and industry professionals, using insights organized in Google Sheets and data visualized in Figma.
Easily understandable, user-friendly EULAs build trust and transparency between software providers and users; not only improving overall UX but also strengthening engagement and compliance, ultimately enhancing brand credibility and reputation.
Act
The wireframe is created for mobile users as much of our free time is spent looking at a pocket screen. It is also a website, as opposed to another application to bloat your device.
I begin fleshing out user flows and prototyping interactions with Figma in March of 2024, following the design solutions distilled from my research and feedback received from panels.
iterate
Mini thumbnails of common EULA terms are a good base for digital sketches. Some icons feel successful after the second iteration, but others would take up to 9 revisions.
pari passu’s loud, colorful palette counteracts the rigid and dense formatting of written agreements. these colors are paired with more anonymous typefaces: a slab serif display and calm yet stylish sans-serif read.
Deliver
completed in late April of 2024, pari passu is a part of the cornish exit senior Design bfa exhibition. its entire research and design process is documented in a 64-page process book.
accessible below, the prototype features:
- categorized database of eULAs with data visualization
- search engine tool
- public feedback system
- graphic standards manual for effective visual communication and humanized software agreements