A User-Centered Design Approach to Develop a Privacy Awareness

Application

Anika Tabassum Era

, Tanjila Kanij

2 a

, John Grundy

3 b

and Md Al Mamun

Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology, Rajshahi, Bangladesh

Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Keywords:

User-Centered Design, Persona, Prototype, Usability Evaluation.

Abstract:

There are more than 50 million Facebook users in Bangladesh. Despite its wide usage, Facebook has resulted

in negative impacts on individuals and the community, mostly due to improper use of the media. In our prior

research, from a survey of almost 200 Facebook users in Bangladesh, we found that some Facebook users

had (1) diverse demographic characteristics, (2) varied levels of understanding, and (3) reluctance to learn the

features needed help to understand the features to use Facebook properly. In this research, we designed a low-

ﬁdelity prototype with interactive video tutorials and quizzes to help them improve their awareness of privacy

on Facebook, especially with complicated privacy settings. We conducted a detailed usability evaluation and

collected feedback from eleven participants and adjusted the prototype based on the received feedback. Once

developed the application will be helpful to improve the overall Facebook experience of users in Bangladesh.

We also reﬂect on the experience of the User-Centered Design (UCD) and recommend how UCD can be

planned for other similar user groups.

1 INTRODUCTION

Bangladesh was 8th globally in terms of Facebook

users April 2024 (Dixon, 2024). Due to the re-

cent “Digital and Smart Bangladesh” initiatives of the

government in the country, digital devices have be-

come easily accessible and Facebook is competent to

be used by anyone (Knautz and Baran, 2016). All

these made Facebook the most popular social me-

dia in the country which has brought numerous ben-

eﬁts to the lives of people in Bangladesh, includ-

ing F-commerce to empower women (Zabeen et al.,

2013; Basak, 2022). However, Facebook has had

many negative consequences for society, including

spreading misinformation and breach of privacy (Ali,

2020). A major reason behind the negative conse-

quences is an insufﬁcient understanding of privacy,

which is often inﬂuenced by the varying digital liter-

acy (Kanij et al., 2023) and complicated privacy set-

tings (Kshetri, 2011).

To understand the perception of privacy among

the general population of Bangladesh, we conducted

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5293-1718

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4928-7076

a broad survey where we identiﬁed three groups of

Facebook users - (1) understand the privacy features

and use those properly, (2) do not understand the

privacy features very well and are reluctant to learn

new features, and (3) understand the privacy features,

however, do not use those properly. The second and

third groups of Facebook users needed some help to

improve their privacy protection behavior, for that we

developed an interactive quiz-based application.

As suggested by Grundy et al., diverse user char-

acteristics should be incorporated into the process of

designing and developing any software solution for

diverse end users (Grundy et al., 2020). Therefore, we

followed a User-Centered Design (UCD) approach

to develop an interactive privacy awareness applica-

tion for the diverse Facebook users in Bangladesh.

The UCD approach recommends that solutions be

designed iteratively and incrementally together with

users. In this research, we developed a low-ﬁdelity

interactive privacy awareness application prototype

and evaluated the interface with eleven participants.

Based on their feedback, we improved the applica-

tion. Once developed, the application will help Face-

book users in Bangladesh understand the complex

privacy settings.Reﬂecting on our UCD process with

692

Era, A. T., Kanij, T., Grundy, J. and Al Mamun, M.

A User-Centered Design Approach to Develop a Privacy Awareness Application.

DOI: 10.5220/0013430100003928

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2025), pages 692-699

ISBN: 978-989-758-742-9; ISSN: 2184-4895

Facebook users in Bangladesh, we also recommend

to future researchers and developers how UCD can be

used for other diverse end-user groups.

2 BACKGROUND

User-Centered Design (UCD), introduced by Nor-

man in the 1980s (Norman and Draper, 1986), is

the concept of ensuring user participation through-

out the design process (Abras et al., 2004). Initially

used in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), UCD

has been adopted to software development method-

ology where end-users are placed at the center of the

process (Lowdermilk, 2013). The beneﬁts of UCD in-

clude the sense of ownership, higher satisfaction, and

chances of adoption by the end-users (Preece et al.,

2015). Some prominent UCD principles are Nor-

man’s seven principles (Norman, 1988), Shnieder-

man’s eight golden rules (Shneiderman, 1986), and

Neilsens’s heuristics (Nielsen, 1995). All the princi-

ples emphasize simplicity, visibility, ease of learning

and use, precise mapping between action and effect,

and feedback and interpretation (Abras et al., 2004).

User Modeling: Persona. A persona represents a

group of end users of a software application (Grudin

and Pruitt, 2002). A persona is often described with

names, images, and demographic information (Pruitt

and Adlin, 2010) and background, goals, interests,

and frustrations (Cooper, 1999). Personas give a

real impression of the end-users and help developers

build empathy with them. Usually, there are three

broad approaches to persona development: qualita-

tive, quantitative, and mixed (Tu et al., 2010). The

qualitative approaches include exploratory user re-

search with a medium sample size to understand end-

user characteristics and behaviour through an itera-

tive process (McGinn and Kotamraju, 2008). Quan-

titative persona development approaches focus on a

large pool of data collected through surveys, online

data sources, and algorithmic analysis (Jansen et al.,

2022). The third and ﬁnal approach is called the

mixed approach, which combines quantitative and

qualitative approaches, usually targeting one end-user

group such as the elderly (Cooper et al., 2007). One

of the most popular ways of developing personas is

Nielsen’s ten-step process for persona development,

which is considered a generalized mixed method for

developing persona (Nielsen, 2004).

Design Solution: Prototypes. A prototype is an

early-stage design of an application. The design can

be presented as sketches on paper, with diagrams or

the frontend interface. Some of the purposes of hav-

ing prototypes are to communicate the design idea,

to get early feedback to reﬁne the designs, explore

new design ideas, and learn more about the design

space (Camburn et al., 2017). Prototyping can be

iterative, where design is reﬁned through iterations

(Reed Doke, 1990). Prototyping can also be parallel,

where different designs are developed independently

to compare and select (Borowski, 2012).

Usability Evaluation. Usability evaluation is the

process of evaluating the design solution (prototype).

This can be conducted as a laboratory study with or

without real users (heuristic testing), as ﬁeld studies

to understand the users’ experience, and as a hands-

on measurement to ﬁnd usability measures (Nayebi

et al., 2012). A usability evaluation including real

users gives them some tasks to complete on the de-

sign solution.

3 RELATED WORK

Privacy and Facebook: Privacy on a social media

platform has always been a matter of concern. How-

ever, after the Cambridge Analytica incident, privacy

related to Facebook brought the issue into the lime-

light (Senate, 2018). A review of Facebook privacy-

related literature indicates that the privacy protec-

tion behavior of Facebook users is inﬂuenced by (ei-

ther as causal or as consequential) several aspects

such as “threats”, “understanding of privacy settings

provided by Facebook”, “literacy”, “experience” and

“culture” (Brown, 2020; Nyoni and Velempini, 2018;

Teresa L. Mendoza and Jun P. Mariani, 2022; Alkire

et al., 2019). As the number of Facebook users in

Bangladesh is growing at a very high rate, all of these

aspects are important to study in the context of Face-

book users in Bangladesh. This will help understand

the level of awareness and the consequent behavior

and identify the interventions needed.

Privacy Norm in Bangladesh: Privacy related to

digital devices and internet usage in Bangladesh is in-

ﬂuenced by surveillance, cultural context, and lack of

knowledge and practice (Jay et al., 2018). Mobile de-

vices are often registered to a different person than

the actual phone user (Ahmed et al., 2017b), and de-

vices are shared among the family members (Ahmed

et al., 2017c). A similar practice of device sharing is

also seen in nearby nations such as India and Pakistan

(Sambasivan et al., 2018). Overall, the perception of

privacy differs greatly from that of any Western cul-

ture (Sambasivan et al., 2018). The differences in per-

ceptions of privacy and device sharing practices often

lead to privacy violations, resulting in negative conse-

quences.

Facebook Privacy in Bangladesh: Facebook

A User-Centered Design Approach to Develop a Privacy Awareness Application

693

privacy-related research in Bangladesh can be divided

into two broad themes: (1) studying usage behavior

and (2) suggesting “tips” for safe use of Facebook.

In a recent survey, Rahman found that although most

Facebook users in their sample understood and were

welcoming to the privacy features provided by Face-

book, a few of them practiced those, including chang-

ing passwords, using two-factor authentication, and

checking for alerts (Rahman, 2022). The behaviour

resembles a phenomenon called privacy paradox re-

ported by Barth, and Jong (Barth and de Jong, 2017).

In suggesting Tips for safe usage, Rahman and Ul-

lah provided six privacy settings to protect informa-

tion from being visible to the public and third parties

(Facebook ads) (Rahaman and Ullah, 2013). Ahmed

et al. suggest setting the privacy options depending on

priorities, regularly checking privacy settings, think-

ing before accepting stranger friend requests, restrict-

ing wall posts to friends only, and blocking unneces-

sary or irritating users. They prioritize women Face-

book users, as the majority of victims of cybercrime

were women (Ahmed et al., 2017a). To deal with ha-

rassment and bullying in Facebook groups (especially

against women), the group admins take different ap-

proaches, such as connecting among themselves (Sul-

tana et al., 2020).

Facebook Initiatives: Facebook has initiated the

“We Think Digital” program in the Asia Paciﬁc re-

gion in collaboration with experts (Meta, 2022a). The

core aim of the program is to make a skillful digital

citizen with their open source learning modules and

resources (Meta, 2022c) and knowledge-based ques-

tions (Meta, 2022b). Their web portal for Bangladesh

has a well-organized learning modules, links to the

privacy center of Facebook, and a few videos, how-

ever, these are not interactive (Meta, 2023).

4 APPLICATION DESIGN

In previous research to understand the perceptions

of privacy and the privacy behaviors of Facebook

users in Bangladesh, we conducted an online survey

with 188 Facebook users in Bangladesh (reference re-

moved for anonymous review). From the survey ﬁnd-

ings, it was clear that Facebook users in Bangladesh

are concerned about their privacy on Facebook. How-

ever, some of them do not understand all the privacy

settings properly. Moreover, those who understand

the privacy settings do not use them properly. It was

also found that some of the Facebook settings are very

complicated, as already reported by Kshetri (Kshetri,

2011). For some users, understanding the settings just

by reading the description was not helpful. We de-

rived the idea of a privacy awareness application from

our survey ﬁndings.

4.1 Development of Persona

From the survey responses, we noticed different clus-

ters of Facebook users in the context of privacy. The

ﬁrst group of users had an in-depth understanding of

the privacy feature and were mostly adults under 42.

A second group of Facebook users mainly over the

age of 42, did not have a good understanding of the

privacy features Facebook provides due to their un-

willingness to learn the settings. However, interest-

ingly, this group of Facebook users also communi-

cated their concerns about hacking, mobile banking-

related problems, and so on. A third group of Face-

book users mainly was from the 13-18 age group who

had some basic understanding of making new con-

nections and tagging, proﬁle locking and two-factor

authentication. However, they do not know about

review-tagged posts and search engine features. We

developed one persona for the second and the third

group of Facebook users as we believe those two

groups required the privacy awareness application.

We followed Nielsen’s ten-step (Nielsen, 2004) ap-

proach to develop personas. Figure 1 represents the

persona of the second group.

Experience

Age: 60 years

Gender: Male

Babu lives with his wife and adult son. He is very near to retirement. As

Babu has no other work after ofﬁce his son introduced him to Facebook to get

connected with his friends and colleagues. Babu enjoys browsing his news feed,

which has almost become an addiction.

Active Presence on Facebook

Babu’s interests include - political viewpoints and current world affairs. He

considers Facebook as a great medium to gain knowledge regardless of justifying

authentic news. Lately, he has not focused on any real-life socialization rather

he is indulging in Facebook content.

Facebook Common Feature Usage

When Babu ﬁnds any interesting video or post regarding politics, he tries to

share his opinion. He gets inﬂuenced by other people who comment. The

posts being public, Babu often gets negative messages from other people whose

ideology does not match his. All these unwanted behaviors make him mentally

upset. Despite all these problems, he experienced a wonderful moment, when he

was tagged to a colleague’s post, one of his childhood friends got connected to

him and it made him really happy. His friend happened to be a cousin of his

colleague.

Facebook Privacy Policy Check

When Babu experiences unpleasant situations from random users, can not ﬁgure

out how to react. He often gets triggered and sometimes reacts passively to his

family members. Once his account was hacked and later was recovered logging

out of all devices. Since then he has been cautious not to log in to Facebook

from any other device. He is also afraid of trying anything on Facebook, except

reading posts and reacting with Like, Comment, and Share.

Babu

Figure 1: Persona Babu.

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4.2 Speciﬁcation of Requirements

From the qualitative responses of the survey describ-

ing some of the experiences of the participants with

Facebook privacy settings, especially with compli-

cated ones such as reviewing tagged posts and setting

the audience of each post (interplay with proﬁle au-

dience setting), we identiﬁed different scenarios that

could be described to the participants with a video tu-

torial on a mobile application. Moreover, associating

ambiguous scenarios to select the best privacy setting

would make their understanding of the features com-

plete and help them effectively use those on Facebook

itself. A list of primary requirements for the proposed

privacy awareness application is presented in Table 1.

Table 1: Requirements.

1 Video Tutorial

Requirement The application will provide a description of each Facebook pri-

vacy feature with video

Rationale This will help users understand what the feature offers and the

importance of it

Note The video should contain description, demonstrations and exam-

ple scenarios

Source Survey response on review of tagged posts and setting of an au-

dience for posts indicated that users do not understand how these

function

2 Scenario based quiz

Requirement After each video the application should present example scenario

asking for response from the users

Rationale It is difﬁcult to remember and understand the complicated fea-

tures just by knowing those, this feature will help users to logi-

cally work out how the features are used in real-world scenarios

Note Scenarios should be designed in a way that requires users to think

rationally

Source Survey response where users shared their past experiences of not

effectively ﬁguring out what settings to use

4.3 Development of Prototype

We designed a low-ﬁdelity prototype application to

help them describe different privacy features with

video tutorials and scenario-based interactive quizzes.

Considering the personas we developed, we tried to

make the prototype as simple and intuitive as possi-

ble. The prototype was developed based on Nielsen’s

recommendations (Nielsen, 2004). Our prototype was

designed with Figma, a widely accepted tool for pro-

totype design, and developed in both Bangla and En-

glish to cater to different audiences. The prototype is

presented in Figure 2, showing the English interface.

For simplicity, we will describe the English ver-

sion of the prototype; the Bangla version works ex-

actly the same as the English one. The key features of

the prototype included - an introductory view with the

general description of the application, a home page

listing different Facebook features, a tutorial page on

each of the Facebook features (listed on the home

page), an interactive quiz page based on each feature,

and a feedback page for showing the feedback on quiz

response.

Consider the user persona “Babu”. When “Babu”

visits the “PA App” he notices the introduction page

(“PA App - Introduction E”) describing the applica-

tion. Clicking on the “Start” button on this page

“Babu” is taken to the home page view (“PA App -

Homepage E”). The home page contains the list of

Facebook features; for the initial version, we listed

four features of Facebook such as - 1) Passwords, 2)

Friends, 3) Tagging, and 4) Audience. “Babu” can

click one of the features and will be taken to the tu-

torial for the respective feature. For the ﬁrst iteration,

we developed a video tutorial for the “Audience” fea-

ture only. Therefore, as soon as “Babu” clicks the

option “Audience”, he will be on the “Tutorial page”

(“PA App - Tutorial Page E”). In the “Tutorial page”

(“PA App - Tutorial Page E”), “Babu” can watch the

video tutorial for the “Audience” feature of Facebook.

When “Babu” has completed the video tutorial he can

click on the “Quiz” button to get to the next page.

In the “Quiz” page (“PA App - Quiz Page E”), a

scenario-based incident related to audience settings

on Facebook is presented in the form of a quiz, and

“Babu” is asked what his preferred audience for such

a case. He makes his choice and clicks on the “Feed-

back” button to visit the (“PA App - Feedback Page

E”). This page shows a message that describes what

option would have been appropriate according to the

scenario. The feedback also contains a description of

all the options with an explanation of what would be

appropriate in which scenario.

5 USABILITY EVALUATION

We presented our prototype to several Facebook users

and collected their feedback to reﬁne the prototype.

The evaluation was conducted according to the Hu-

man Research Ethics protocols and consent was col-

lected from all participants before evaluation. There

were a total of 15 questions (11 closed, 4 open-

ended). We used SUS (Brooke, 1995) questionnaires

to collect feedback on usability. Participants were

asked to complete one tutorial and the relevant quiz

in the prototype and answer questions such as how

easy/difﬁcult it was to use and learn, whether they

needed help, how often they would use the applica-

tion, whether the prototype was helpful, and so on.

They also provided feedback on the open-ended ques-

tions on the overall prototype, the challenges and im-

provements. Data was collected using a Google form.

A User-Centered Design Approach to Develop a Privacy Awareness Application

695

Figure 2: Overview of the Prototype.

Table 2: Evaluation Result on Prototype.

Functionality

Feedback Changes to be made

Personalized quiz Integrate with the Facebook proﬁle of the user or add an introductory quiz

More features Add more topics of tutorial

Involving resourceful persons Recruit UX designers and researchers

More scenarios Add more relevant scenarios for better learning

Usability

Radio button feedback Add hover feature

Old fashioned No change

Color theme No change

Participants were recruited from personal contacts us-

ing convenience sampling. We used Thematic analy-

sis for qualitative data.

There were eleven participants (four male, seven

female) to evaluate the ﬁrst version of the prototype.

One participant was between 13 and 17 years old, ﬁve

were between 18 and 26, four were between 27 and

42, and one was between 43 and 59. We will refer to

them as P1 - P11. All participants except one, said the

difﬁculty level was either easy or normal. In the open-

ended comments participants provided welcoming re-

sponses. For example, P4 - “It was a good learn. I

made the wrong choice. but later I got to know from

the feedback why I should have chosen otherwise”,

P9 - “Application is well needed. Though I am us-

ing FB for several years now, yet I didn’t know some

of the information”, P10 - “Quite descend applica-

tion. Easy for the new users of social media. Old

people who recently become active in social media

can use this for safety purpose”. The responses to the

closed-ended questions are presented in Table 3. The

ﬁve-point Likert scale was converted to a three-point

Likert as there was less diversity in responses. Based

on open-ended responses we derived suggestions to

improve the prototype as listed in Table 2.

Functionality: When asked if they found anything

challenging about the application, most were com-

fortable using it. In response to how we could im-

prove the prototype, most of them said it was all right

except P9 added a valuable comment -“Only if you

Table 3: System Usability Scale Report.

Would Like to Use Frequently? Unnecessary Complex?

Disagree 0 Disagree 10

Neutral 2 Neutral 1

Agree 9 Agree 0

Ease of Usage Technical Person Needed?

Disagree 0 Disagree 10

Neutral 1 Neutral 0

Agree 10 Agree 1

Functions Well Integrated Present of Inconsistency

Disagree 0 Disagree 10

Neutral 1 Neutral 0

Agree 10 Agree 1

Easy to Learn Cumbersome

Disagree 0 Disagree 10

Neutral 0 Neutral 1

Agree 11 Agree 0

Conﬁdent to Use Needed to Learn Before Using

Disagree 0 Disagree 9

Neutral 2 Neutral 1

Agree 9 Agree 1

can at ﬁrst ﬁnd out what type of post the user usu-

ally posts. Then present the post of the quiz accord-

ing to the user”. Since this prototype is not inte-

grated with the Facebook proﬁle of the user, it is dif-

ﬁcult to provide personalized quiz questions to each

user. The prototype can be improved to either inte-

grate the user’s Facebook proﬁle or present an intro-

ductory quiz at the beginning to understand speciﬁc

user preferences. In either case, the feature will need

to be implemented with AI.

Usability: Overall, all participants seemed to be

happy with the usability of the prototype as illustrated

in Table 2. One participant (P5) shared not being able

to interact with the radio button - “I couldn’t under-

stand which radio button I pressed as the radio didn’t

activate”. There were no radio buttons used, however,

the “PA App - Quiz Page” contains check boxes. We

believe the participant was referring to that. We will

add a “hover” feature to let users know what they are

selecting. In reviewing the usability of the prototype,

P4 said “The app style is old-fashioned. Could have

been more interesting and fun” and P8 said - “Maybe

the color combination? I don’t know. I found it just

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696

okay”. Since both the participants were not speciﬁc,

we did not make any changes.

Improvements: Based on the feedback received in

the evaluation phase with the users, we include more

functional requirements to our original set of high-

level requirements. An updated list is presented in

Table 4. The major update is adding an introduc-

tory quiz, as suggested by P9. The quiz will assess

the level of understanding of the privacy features, and

based on the assessment, appropriate tutorials, and as-

sociated scenario-based quizzes will be provided to

the users. We will make the introductory quiz a peri-

odical one so that users can re-check their understand-

ings.

Table 4: New Requirements After Usability Evaluation.

3 An introductory quiz

Requirement The application will contain a quiz on different privacy features

Rationale The quiz will assess the user’s understanding of privacy features

Note The quiz will be presented at the beginning and can be visited

periodically

Source Usability evaluation (P9)

4 Tutorial and scenario based on understanding level

Requirement The application will present the video tutorial and the scenarios

based on the level of understanding of privacy features as as-

sessed by the introductory quiz

Rationale The purpose of the introductory quiz is to assess the level of un-

derstanding of the privacy features, so that users are presented

with tutorials and scenarios matching their understanding

Note This requirement will ensure that expert users are not presented

with simple scenarios and vice versa

Source Usability evaluation (P9)

6 DISCUSSION

We summarize the lessons we have learned and pro-

pose speciﬁc recommendations for different phases of

the UCD process. We also suggest future directions

for the development of the designed privacy aware-

ness applications and aim to replicate the study with

more diverse user groups. Figure 3 presents our rec-

ommendations for each UCD phase.

Demonstration of Concepts: From the detailed sur-

vey responses we found that one group of users in-

dicated conﬁdence in the privacy features; however,

from some shared experiences, we found that they

were not using the privacy features properly (despite

saying they understood those). For example, one par-

ticipant said they hesitated to share a photo of hang-

ing out with friends late at night, as this can upset

their mother. However, earlier, they said they un-

derstood how the audience setting feature “friends

except” worked. This example comment indicates

that the participants did not use the setting to ex-

Figure 3: Recommendations for UCD.

clude someone seeing their post. This indicates that

Facebook users in Bangladesh often cannot use their

privacy settings properly, although they understand

them. This implies the necessity of teaching the set-

tings with example cases. Due to the complex na-

ture of the settings, it wasn’t easy to express the sur-

vey questions with words only. As such, we included

diagrams, images, and example cases. Surprisingly,

some of the survey participants indicated that those

were very helpful. This is another motivation behind

developing a privacy awareness application that will

teach the settings and help the users use rational think-

ing to apply those in example scenarios to prepare bet-

ter for real life.

Importance of Persona: We found that according

to the awareness of privacy features and their applica-

tion, there are different groups of users. We found two

groups of users who needed some training on under-

standing the privacy settings. The privacy awareness

application is designed for the customized needs of

these two groups of users. Personas were very helpful

in understanding and empathizing with those diverse

users. For example, the persona in Figure 1 was reluc-

tant to learn new things. These unique characteristics

were considered while designing the prototype. Exist-

ing literature also reported similar experiences (Kanij

et al., 2023).

Low-Fidelity Prototype: The usability evaluation

with the low-ﬁdelity prototype helped communicate

the concept of a tutorial and scenario-based applica-

tion to the users, getting feedback on the design con-

cept, and reﬁning the prototype with new directions

that gravitated toward what the users expected. Since

awareness-building applications, especially for social

media usage (speciﬁcally Facebook usage in Bangla),

are not a familiar concept, the prototype with sample

video and quiz helped the users understand the pur-

pose and ﬂow of the privacy awareness application

under consideration. It will be possible without the

prototype. Moreover, users could navigate through

the application interface on the Figma prototype, and

as such, they provided critical feedback on usability,

A User-Centered Design Approach to Develop a Privacy Awareness Application

697

such as colour and highlighting options. Most impor-

tantly, they provided an excellent idea of customiz-

ing the content based on users’ level of understand-

ing. This led to the addition of an introductory quiz to

assess the level of knowledge of privacy features.

User-Centered Design: We presented our experi-

ence of a complete UCD process to design a privacy-

awareness mobile application. From understanding

the context of use to evaluating the prototype, we col-

laborated with the users and found that it is neces-

sary to include them in the process as they add valu-

able insight. Once presented with some artifacts, such

as the prototype, they were able to provide very spe-

ciﬁc feedback. Based on our experience, we also rec-

ommend including them in the development process.

We suggest that incremental development approaches

such as Scrum be followed.

Adaptive Application: Our preliminary research

found that Facebook users in Bangladesh have differ-

ent perceptions and levels of knowledge of privacy.

We designed a privacy awareness mobile application

for those who we identiﬁed as needing help (not un-

derstanding the privacy setting or being reluctant to

learn). However, during the usability evaluation, one

participant suggested customizing the application’s

content based on the users’ understanding level. To

address the suggestion, we included a quiz that will

assess the user’s level of understanding and present

the content accordingly. In this way, the application

can adapt to the users’ needs. This feature request in-

dicates that similar applications must be designed to

be adaptive to user needs.

Usability Evaluation Feedback: Although we used

the SUS questionnaire to obtain a quantitative mea-

sure of our design, we found that the qualitative feed-

back provided by the users was constructive in (1) re-

ﬁning the design (i.e., ambiguity with check boxes

corrected by using Hoover feature) and (2) ﬁnding

new requirements (i.e., suggesting to link Facebook

proﬁle or including a quiz to assess the level of un-

derstanding of the user). From this experience, we

recommend that usability evaluations should not only

rely on quantitative measures, but however, should be

complemented with qualitative feedback.

7 CONCLUSION

Although there are millions of users of Facebook in

Bangladesh, not all of them understand the features

provided by Facebook and consequently can use those

properly. We identiﬁed the user groups that need help

understanding Facebook features. We developed a

low-ﬁdelity prototype for a privacy awareness appli-

cation, taking the diverse end user needs in mind, and

collected feedback on the prototype. We reﬂect on

our overall UCD approach to understanding the con-

text of use, specify requirements, design a prototype,

and evaluate those with the users. Based on the feed-

back received during evaluation, the prototype is re-

ﬁned to reﬂect user expectations more. We found

that the persona to represent diverse end users and the

low-ﬁdelity prototype to communicate the design idea

were very helpful. Based on the experience we pro-

pose to include representative users in developing and

testing the application.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Kanij and Grundy are supported by ARC Laureate

Fellowship FL190100035.

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