Google GDPR site

2017

Hypothesis

That Google needed to better communicate how it adhered - and went beyond - GDPR regulations to maintain trust with both consumers and governments.

Process

The hard part of this product had nothing to do with technology or design. Functionally the site was built on Google’s proprietary static site software whilst the design had to sit within Google’s style-guide. A dose of complexity came through needing to use Lottie to render video files in JSON but was a relatively self-contained type of difficulty.

The challenging piece was working across the many, many, many stakeholders to resolve how to best communicate the information. Did it need to be as short and concise as possible? Or did it need to go into every level of minutiae across the company? Did every Google product need to be referenced or was it better to communicate general practices? How visually could trust be communicated? Were visuals even desirable to such a business critical website? Could it evolve and improve or did we have to get the content perfect the first time?

Through workshops, co-located working and many video calls we worked through a huge number of iterations until arriving at consensus. It was a fascinating process in large-scale organisation decision-making.

Team

Sam Smith (Design), John Castle (Design), Stephen Waller (Design), James Spencer (Dev), Paolo Chilleri (Dev), Amanda Storey (Google), Christie Travers-Smith (Google)

Tools

Sketch, G-Suite, patience

Technology

Google proprietary web app