Trend Towards Personal Products
We have all been told that the way to acquire and retain customers in a competitive market is to tailor our products to the personal needs of the few. By doing so, the data we capture about our customers will naturally become more individualized and in most cases, more sensitive.
In responsible hands, this data set can drive the development of profitable products that can turn interested consumers to loyal customers. On the flip side, the same data can be used to commit nefarious activities from the common fraud to sophisticated behavioral manipulation through targeted messaging based on preferential data.
Some will claim that the collection and inevitable misuse of these data sets are unintended consequences of business operations. This was justifiable years ago when security research and tools were exclusive to large companies.
Today, consumers, partners and regulators demand more transparency and accountability regarding data collection and use from businesses of any size.
Baby in a Rollercoaster
How do you secure a baby in a rollercoaster?
Design a carseat intended to be attached to rollercoasters.
Or, you don’t let them ride in the first place.
It sounds obvious and yet we have a market full of products intended to protect data in transit and at rest. These are your Firewalls, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Encryption, Anti-Malware and File Integrity Protection to name a few. These tools are designed to protect your systems and data from unauthorized access and change.
When judged based on their merits, the best of these tools perform exactly as they are sold and more. With their benefits though, comes along the need for upkeep items such as license subscriptions, professional administration and maintenance.
In addition, alongside their costly implementation periods and configuration tuning phases is the inevitable disruption of your regular business flow because of glitches and outages. All these while you or your employees figure out a way around the protections because you need to perform your tasks the way you are accustomed to.
Even with such complexities, we simply tolerate them because the security guidelines, compliance standards and regulators require us to comply.
That is— if we want to continue allowing babies into our rollercoasters.
Alternative: Inspire Design with Security Intentions
You’re probably wondering that if we start with security and privacy intentions, wouldn’t that hinder the creative process?
First Look: Security and creativity are two opposing forces with one restricting and the later one maximizing.
Closer Look: Design is powered by creativity, productive creativity is driven by constraints, security and privacy intentions fit the constraint mold just fine.
Just like how we constraint our ideas with factors considering business viability, technical feasibility and user desirability during the design process, we argue that adding security and privacy as core product values is a natural evolution of the design process in today’s market.
Putting It All Together
At Craftelli Design, we value security, simplicity and storytelling.
Secure products are simpler to make and easier to market.
Simple products are easier to secure and come across as memorable in the market.
Story driven products are ones that have a simple and secure command of their values.