Achieving Privacy Through UX Design in Instant Messaging Apps

Protecting and enhancing informational privacy is crucial in user-to-user interactions, particularly through instant messaging apps. Careless and malicious handling of personal information can harm users’ well-being and dignity. However, there is a need for a better understanding of the relationship between informational privacy and UX design in both design practice and academic research. This paper aims to bridge this gap and explain how privacy can be achieved through meaningful UX design. The research presented in this paper focuses on Confide, an instant messaging app promoted as the ‘Confidential Messenger’. In a lab test involving the app’s actual usage, we first subjected it to a privacy assessment. Then, we analyzed Confide’s UX through a heuristic assessment followed by an authors’ UX report. The research revealed that users’ freedom to manage their privacy settings leads to a meaningful UX. The methodology proposed in this paper is appropriate for investigating how designed products combine informational privacy and good UX design due to its replicability and scalability.