Martin Ortlieb
I am a qualitative User Experience Researcher at Google currently investigating how people work with each other, with technology, and how technology can help improving the world of global work in the 21st century.
For 6 years I led the User Experience Research team on the Privacy effort. I helped with the launch of the Privacy Dashboard, Account Activity, Inactive Account Manager and other Google tools for users' privacy and security. At Google, I also worked on SafeSearch, Account Recovery, Priority Inbox, Alerts and Panoramio.
Before joining Google in 2008, I worked on both sides of the client/consultant divide to improve services and products and their interfaces.
My PhD research and dissertation in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester focused on the imagination of identity through conceptions of work.
Authored Publications
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Techno-critics of Interactive Services for Life-Changing Events: Discovering Inadequacies of Design Through the Lens of Non-Users
Luca Reut
Mauro Cherubini
ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (2020) (to appear)
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Life-changing events (or LCEs) can alter a person’s status quo and threaten well-being. Previous research investigated distinct LCEs, where participants already used technology routinely. This paper reports the results of two field studies through which we compared supports people refer to when experiencing different LCEs. Together with users of technology, our sampling included participants who specifically did not refer to online services and tools to seek help during their LCE. We found that popular services people refer to are inattentive to the needs of people experiencing an LCE as they do not allow forms of progressive engagement and disclosure within the service. We also found that popular services are imprudent as their design might expose users experiencing an LCE to more sources of stress. Finally, we found that these services are inapt to support these users as they do not provide direct forms of interactions with experts.
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Case Study: Creative Assistance for Knowledge workers
Blackwell Publishing Ltd (?) (2019)
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GSuite is changing the nature of Knowledge Work across 5 million businesses through AI-powered assistance. To ensure that this evolution reflects the aspirations and priorities of workers, Google and Stripe Partners conducted a multi-national ethnography of Knowledge Workers covering a range of industries. We identified that workers distinguish between ‘Core’ and ‘Peripheral’ work: the work they are paid to do and identify with, and the work that does not contribute to their success or happiness. Workers want assistance to enhance Core work and remove Peripheral work, nuanced across a spectrum of support. This framework and taxonomy has been adopted by teams at Google to inform strategic decisions on how AI is integrated by GSuite. New features are being implemented within Gmail, Slides, Docs and Sheets that bring these principles to life in the user experience.
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Sensitivity of Personal Data Items in Different Online Contexts
Ryan Garner
it - Information Technology Journal Special Edition Usable Privacy and Security (2016)
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We present the results of a survey study (n=1,200) investigating online users’ privacy sensitivity towards exposing specific data items to service providers of the three most prominent online services in the UK: online retail, social networking and information search. The study, representative of the online population of the UK, presents proof for the context-dependence of privacy sensitivity and provides concrete quantitative results for specific data items (like full name or mobile phone number). One of the key results is that data that is considered essential in order for a service to work is seldomly rated as sensitive. We could also show that passively collected data is in general more sensitive than concrete data provided by the users. However, specific
conditions like control and transparency sensitivity of data in a specific context.
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Expert and Non-Expert Attitudes towards (Secure) Instant Messaging
Sauvik Das
Iulia Ion
Twelfth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2016), USENIX Association, Denver, CO, pp. 147-157
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In this paper, we present results from an online survey with 1,510 participants and an interview study with 31 participants on (secure) mobile instant messaging. Our goal was to uncover how much of a role security and privacy played in people's decisions to use a mobile instant messenger. In the interview study, we recruited a balanced sample of IT security experts and non-experts, as well as an equal split of users of mobile instant messengers that are advertised as being more secure and/or private (e.g., Threema) than traditional mobile IMs. Our results suggest that peer influence is what primarily drives people to use a particular mobile IM, even for secure/private IMs, and that security and privacy play minor roles.
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Online services often rely on processing users’ data, which can be either provided directly by the users or combined from other services. Although users are aware of the latter, it is unclear whether they are comfortable with such data combination, whether they view it as beneficial for them, or the extent to which they believe that their privacy is exposed. Through an online survey (N=918) and follow-up interviews (N=14), we show that (1) comfort is highly dependent on the type of data, type of service and on the existence of a direct relationship with a company, (2) users have a highly different opinion about the presence of benefits for them, irrespectively of the context, and (3) users perceive the combination of online data as more identifying than data related to offline and physical behavior (such as location). Finally, we discuss several strategies for companies to improve upon these issues
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“WTH..!?!” Experiences, reactions, and expectations related to online privacy panic situations
Julio Angulo
Eleventh Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2015), USENIX Association
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There are moments in which users might find themselves experiencing feelings of panic with the realization that their privacy or personal information on the Internet might be at risk. We present an exploratory study on common experiences of online privacy-related panic and on users’ reactions to frequently occurring privacy incidents. By using the metaphor of a privacy panic button, we also gather users’ expectations on the type of help that they would like to obtain in such situations. Through user interviews (n = 16) and a survey (n = 549), we identify 18 scenarios of privacy panic situations. We ranked these scenarios according to their frequency of occurrence and to the concerns of users to become victims of these incidents. We explore users’ underlying worries of falling pray for these incidents and other contextual factors common to privacy panic experiences. Based on our findings we present implications for the design of a help system for users experiencing privacy panic situations.
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Trust, transparency & control in inferred user interest models
Sebastian Schnorf
CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2014), pp. 2449-2454
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This paper explores the importance of transparency and control to users in the context of inferred user interests. More specifically, we illustrate the association between various levels of control the users have on their inferred interests and users' trust in organizations that provide corresponding content. Our results indicate that users value transparency and control very differently. We segment users in two groups, one who states to not care about their personal interest model and another group that desires some level of control. We found substantial differences in trust impact between segments, depending on actual control option provided.
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A Comparison of Six Sample Providers Regarding Online Privacy Benchmarks
Sebastian Schnorf
Aaron Sedley
Allison Woodruff
SOUPS Workshop on Privacy Personas and Segmentation (2014)
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Researchers increasingly utilize online tools to gather insights.
We show how privacy comfort as measured by questionnaires
differs across various survey sample providers. To investigate
potential differences depending on provider, we fielded a small set
of privacy-related benchmark questions regarding past experience,
present and future concerns to six major US survey providers. We
found substantial differences depending on privacy benchmark
and provider population, illustrating that privacy-related research
may yield different insights depending on provider choice.
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This talk provides comprehensive and up-to-date insights about how users manage identity-related aspects online. We gathered 100+ user stories from 4 countries as well as 1000+ survey responses in the US and UK. We will illustrate how people present themselves in profiles, manage devices, as well as set up and share accounts. Furthermore, we will show how users curate different audiences using social networking sites, if and how users selectively disclose information to others and how users perceive and deal with identity conflation situations. Finally, I will discuss some implications for the development of identity- and privacy-related features.
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Privacy UX - Was ist datenschutzbezogene User Experience?
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Sebastian Schnorf
Kalle Kormann-Philipson
Usability Professionals 12, German UPA (2012), pp. 258-262
