9 Privacy Policy Usability Tips
After realizing I’ve never covered privacy policies here in much depth, I thought it would make a decent blog topic. I sat down to brainstorm a list of what would make for privacy policy usability. What I usually do is go hunting for examples from a variety of online retailers to illustrate the best-practices.
To my surprise, after checking out a handful of sites, I found one e-tailer that covered all the bases – eToys.
Privacy Policy Links
Link from footer – Linking to privacy policies from the footer menu is a convention, meaning enough sites do it this way and it’s likely that a customer will look there first when they want to access the privacy policy. Some sites hide the policy behind “Customer Service” or “FAQ” links, but that reduces the chances customers will find it quickly, if at all.
Link from anywhere you ask for registration – (create account, email sign up etc) to reduce friction and increase opt-ins.
Email Signup:
Account Creation:
You may also want to read: Registration Usability – Permission Email Dos and Donts
Checkout – eToys maintains a footer menu throughout the checkout process along with other important policies.
Privacy Policy Copy
FAQ style bookmark links – Most privacy policies are ridiculously long. Bookmark links give the reader an overview of what you’re talkin’ ’bout, and the ability to jump directly to what they want to know.
Show trust badges and seals prominently – If you’ve paid for these seals to boost trust and conversions, why not leverage them on your privacy page too?
Bold headlines and sub-headlines – Nice and easy to scan.
Plain English, mixed case – THERES NOTHING WORSE THAN 459 LINES OF LEGALESE, IN ALL CAPS. IT HAPPENS. IT SHOULDN’T. LIGHT GRAY TEXT SUCKS TOO.
Visitor surveys – Sometimes websites will invite visitors to complete a satisfaction survey, like 4Q. It’s a good idea to add a link to the privacy policy in the pop-up window or a few sentences of how you respect their privacy. No eToys example for this one.
Got any other tips for privacy policy usability? Please leave a comment.
Nofollow Attributes
Another tip is to add “nofollow” attributes to Privacy Policy links to improve your SEO. If this is all Geek to you, check out a post from that discusses Page Rank sculpting.
D-I-Y Privacy Policies
The Privacy Policy Generator is a great tool for DIY’ers. It asks you to check off what kinds of information you collect, how you use cookies and so on.
Hope this helps you out with your privacy policy usability.
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Very good article.
Something so simple can have such a great impact on users, yet too many companies do a poor job of displaying their private policy effectively throughout the site, especially during user submissions. As always, great article Linda! :)
Koodo Mobile does a good job of this with a Privacy/Legal link in the footer of each page. Other telco sites i visited had it visible in the footer but not as easily accessible.
Very informative articles. It is interesting that so important issue is not touched in many ecommerce websites.