Xbox Privacy Controls
Xbox values privacy as a fundamental right and is dedicated to providing players with products, information, and controls for personalized data collection.
Gamer data is essential for Xbox to provide players with premium services, making it crucial to offer clear consent experiences. This empowers customers to understand and control how their data is used throughout the Xbox ecosystem.
Xbox
2023
Privacy & Security
Product design
Challenge
Navigating global compliance requirements, we needed to implement consent settings allowing Xbox customers to decide the use of their data for personalized purchase promotions, ads, and data sharing.
Results
We created a consent user journey guide. This journey allows users to learn about a feature and the consent requests in stages, which is easier to process.
Following, we implemented these consent journeys across all our surface of the Xbox eco-system.
In compliance with global privacy regulations, we ensured the UX would be viable for each locale. Providing neutral states for the consent controls.
Target for Opt-In for Optional Data Collection (ODC) was based on the rate at 35%. There were concerns that we would drop below that number with the new control. However, we had increased the Opt-In rate by 11.6%.
Due to the discoverable nature of the Personalized Purchase Upsell (PPU) control, overall impact was minimized. 99.8% of users continued to experience Purchase Recommendations.
Of the users who have interacted with the control, more than half still chose to Opt-In.
11.6%
Increased Optional Data collection
Opt-in rate by
99.8%
Continue to experience
Purchase recommendations
Process
Problem definition: We were invited early on in the architecture discovery phase with our privacy team to asses the current state of our current privacy controls. To identify and define the scenarios where we would improve our privacy consent controls.
Research & Analysis: We engaged in user interviews, surveys, and examined our current and historical analytics to gain insights into user pain points and requirements.
Consent User Journey Guide: Any time we ask people to trust us with their data, that consent should be meaningful. To ensure this we made a guide to share with our partner teams to further this initiative to all parts of the project.
Discovery: In the discovery stage, customers are becoming aware of your feature. Here, your goal is to welcome customers into your feature and help them understand what data you’re asking for and why.
Prompt & Request: The prompt & request stage is where you make the full consent request. The goal here is to give people all the information they need, and in a format that is easy to understand, so they can make the decision that they feel is right for them.
Receipt: In the receipt stage, you want to confirm the user’s agreement. The goal here is to respect the user decision and provide clarity to their choice.
Management: Management will be an ongoing stage where people can change their consent or sharing settings. The goal here is to provide the full consent experience whenever they are asked to make a decision around their data
“Our Design team worked tirelessly to come up with intuitive and simple solutions that were visually pleasing and functional.
We’d like to provide special thanks to Raymond Dean. An ever-present and engaged participant in the project, he always provided insightful recommendations and solutions to UX challenges. He also provided great flexibility and responsiveness whenever the requirements of the projects changed.”
Matthew Jackson
Director of Governance | Xbox
Conclusion
We achieved a significant milestone in reaching our goal. The Optional Data Collection, Personalized Purchase, and Ads controls were made available on all our gaming surfaces and apps. Achieving a seamless and universal experience across the gaming ecosystem required a tremendous amount of effort from various teams.