Problem

As digital services emerge, every day we create a huge amount of personal data across various providers. 📱💻⌚️📡 Yet, we don’t know what has been written on our names behind their gates. Why are we—the data generators—kept in the dark from our own data footprints online?

Goal

This is what the think tank Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération (la Fing) and we believe: everyone shall be able to handle our own data, and make use of them for our own good!

Instead of being locked up in companies’ 🔐 cryptic servers, the data that we create daily ought to be provided back to us; they should be as worthy and useful to the individuals as to the companies. 💪🏼

Dive in

My team and I were the UX designers in this project to help promote and deliver benefits of self-ownership and self-governance of personal data ('Self-Data’). We worked with la Fing and Cozy Cloud—an open-source, privacy by design, self-hosting ready storage architecture originated from France. We collaborated with their developers and solution architects to comprehend the functioning of a smart, personal data hub, the intricacies in the linkages & connectors, as well as the overall data models.

We evaluated the types of information and data generated in a contemporary digital daily life. That includes ☎️ telecom bills, 💰 banking entries, ⚡️ energy usage, 🚋 transport expenditure, important papers such as 📜 insurances, as well as 📸🖼 multimedia input as familiar as our smartphones and 📊 activity trackers. From this point, our main job was to make these data speak to their owners—turn data into sense-making, enjoyable experiences to play with on a daily basis.

Hands-on

To better understand how we can maximise the potentials of ‘self-data’, we conducted qualitative and quantitative user research to probe into the handling of personal data of dissimilar profiles, analysed their pain points and the missing hinges. We sought the possibilities to improve their individual digital management and address their needs.

After mapping user concerns against the platform’s status quo, we ideated how we can convert personal data into functions with added value through Cozy Cloud as its unique selling points. We crystalised our findings in use cases and personas. Through an iterative process, we wireframed new functions for the platform and collected feedback from different stakeholders. In the end of our partnership, we presented over our prototype to Cozy Cloud & la Fing, pitched some further concepts, handed over an advisory report and a vision road map for subsequent development of the project.