Personalized Advertising

Allowing users to opt-in (or out) of personalized advertising.

Final Design (Android example)

Background

Under Armour makes you better. With MyFitnessPal, we give you tools to track your nutrition, water, weight & exercise. We give you challenges. A community. Plans to guide you. We motivate. We hold you accountable. We make you better.

But, we are also in the advertising business.

Introducing GDPR

Most media companies are aware of GDPR. The rules specify that publishers and advertisers need to get explicit consent from certain users, in order to employ their personal data and target ads.

Targeted? Basically, ads that are based on previously data to determine ad selection. that date could include a user's previous search queries, activity, visits to sites or apps, demographic information, or location.

The bottom line: Without explicit consent, we were serving ads that people didn’t like the look of. And we were losing millions of dollars.

The Challenge

Regardless of how the consents are packaged, the vast majority of users will decline to allow the tracking of behavior or use of other personal data for targeted ads.

Research by PageFair and various European organizations indicates that the percentage of users who would grant consent to requests such as “allowing third parties to track your online behavior for targeting of relevant ads” is very low, ranging from 5 to 20 percent.

Well, at least I had a number to beat.

Project Goals

1. Obtain consents from the maximum possible number of users

2. Start serving relevant ads to consenting EU users as soon as possible

3. Build a foundation for new location experiences

My Role

I was the lead designer for this project and worked with a team of engineers and a PM. There were major legal hurdles to clear, but we had to plug this leak soon. Time was the biggest constraint.

Design Process

I spent the early stage of this process understanding how we ask for permissions. What are all the types of permissions? How do they differ across platforms, user-types and countries?

Next, I created dozens of prototypes, and reviewed frequently with legal, design & media stakeholders.

Later, I led rounds of usability testing with current users to make sure they experience was usable and understood.

Eventually we rolled out to 100% (Web, iOS & Android). Our current opt-in rate for iOS is 66%.

What I learnt

At the outset of this project, I knew nothing about digital advertising. I gained a much better understanding of how we serve ads, how we work with publishers and the power of personalization to create better experiences.

Personal data is incredibly important and misunderstood by the average user. We owe it to our users to design experiences that are simple to understand and empower you to make the right decisions.