I've been working on a UI-centric, integrated product experience for almost 6 months now, and many times we ran into design challenges that couldn't be solved with features, information architecture or help text. These challenges had to do less with traditional UX problems, and more to do with the needs of enterprise-level customers with a host of security and privacy concerns. The term "policy" started coming up in UX meetings in ways that I've never heard before. Policy was actually being expected to solve some of these unique challenges.
I've seen policy lead to features (report spam, or leave a ratings to improve search results, etc), but I'd never seen policy become features. We came up with some elegant ways of dealing with these gaps in the user experience by integrating behaviors between the tools and requiring certain user actions before reaching UX benchmarks. We're proud of the solutions. But I couldn't help thinking that something was changing in the UX realm. Online and offline behaviors needed a way to understandably influence each other, and the UI needed to be both stern and responsive in order to ensure that businesses felt confident and their users were using the system properly, producing the required ROI.
I'm starting to see this occurring in other interactive experiences lately.
Unvarnished, a "yelp for rating people" requires you to review the person that invited you before it will activate your account, ensuring motivated participation, verified profiles, and a well-propogated system. It also ensures an emotional commitment stemming from your first interaction. Before you even exist in the system, you've contributed a review of another human being that knows you. These offline polices translate into a online user experience.
Policy has a role in user experience, and is getting more attention from startup web and business-level applications due to a rising sensitivity around security and authentication. Flipping those fears into proactive, elegant user experience solutions can do far more than fill feature and technology gaps — it can lead to entirely new ways of handling highly social on/offline user experiences that asks a little from users in order to provide them with a lot more value.
I'm an Interaction Design Lead at a renowned innovation firm in Chicago. I've worked as a writer, strategist and general disseminator of anticipatory design science for a wide variety of industries and clients.
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