CASE STUDY
ONLINE PRIVACY PROTECTION
A free Discover service that scans ten people-search sites and removes personal data over a 91-day quarterly cycle. The design challenge was legibility: users would assume the scan ran on every visit.
CLIENT
Discover Financial Services
YEAR
[ADD YEAR]
ROLE
Lead UX Designer
TOOLS
Axure · Sketch · InDesign
DELIVERABLES
Onboarding · Status dashboard · Scan details · Success states
THE SITUATION
People-search sites broker personal information, often without the subject’s knowledge, and the exposure they create ranges from spam to genuine safety risk. Discover decided to offer its cardmembers something unusual for a financial brand: a free service that automatically scans ten popular people-search sites, locates a customer’s personal records, and removes them, running continuously over a 91-day quarterly cycle. Online Privacy Protection builds trust by giving customers real data protection with no upsell attached.
THE DESIGN PROBLEM
The product’s honesty was also its usability problem. The scan runs quarterly and works invisibly in the background, but our team hypothesized that users would assume a fresh scan ran every time they opened the product. If the dashboard could not make an invisible, slow-moving process legible, users would misread it, question whether the product did anything at all, and churn out of a service that was genuinely protecting them. The ask: an onboarding experience that motivates opt-in, and a dashboard that acts as a real-time tracker of information found and removed, with enough context to prove the product works.
FIG 1 · The status-driven dashboard
A CLEAR OPT-IN
The client wanted onboarding that was direct, quick, and honest about how OPP works, what opting in delivers, and why people-search sites are dangerous. After initial rounds and client reviews we landed on a two-screen solution: easily digestible explanation up front, a brief but useful FAQ behind it. Enough to motivate, nothing to bury the ask.
A DASHBOARD BUILT ON STATES
Opting in triggers an immediate preliminary scan across the ten sites, and the dashboard’s job from that moment is to visually establish that action is happening. The design gives priority to the status of the scan and draws a hard line between its two live conditions: removals in progress, meaning records found and currently being scrubbed, and removals completed. Because the full cycle runs 91 days, the interface has to be evocative enough to communicate a process running behind the scenes while delivering results in real time.
Giving context.
As results populate, users can tap the In Progress and Completed elements to drill into a Scan Details view: results itemized by record type, and within each type, the specific people-search sites where their information appeared. The drill-down turns an abstract count into a concrete, slightly unsettling, and therefore convincing picture of where their data was circulating.
The success state.
When a quarter completes, the dashboard shifts into a distinct success state confirming the finished scan and displaying the period it covered, so the cycle’s rhythm becomes something users can see rather than something they have to take on faith.
RESULTS
1M+
Enrollments in the first month
9M+
Records removed in the first month
10
People-search sites scanned per cycle
The product worked well enough to change its own environment. Within the first month of rollout, automated removals were effective enough that people-finder sites altered their API access, forcing the product to update its UI and permissions and adding manual steps for account removal. It was an adversarial compliment: proof that a product like this was both desirable and, built correctly, genuinely disruptive to the data-broker model.
WHAT THIS DEMONSTRATES
State design as trust design. The entire experience succeeds or fails on whether an invisible 91-day process reads as alive, and every design decision, from the two states to the drill-down to the quarterly close, exists to make the system’s honesty legible.
NEXT PROJECT
