Any company’s website is legally required to have a privacy policy or a privacy notice. That’s just one element of staying compliant with privacy and personal data regulations. Legaltech company Juro has introduced an open-source solution for every owner of a website with a developer on staff. They developed it jointly with designer Stefania Passera.
Design thinking in privacy
People hate reading legalese – and that’s a fact. The concept of legal design was developed by Margaret Hagan to address this issue and make laws, legal systems, and legal documents accessible to the general public. Juro’s privacy notice solution incorporates this notion of design thinking and offers a free readable privacy notice for your website.
https://twitter.com/GetJuro/status/1382617107783892993
You have to customize it to your own business, of course. The changes you’d make would depend on which jurisdiction you’re operating in and which audiences your website is targeted towards, which data you collect, how you process cookies, and other things. Whatever you change, however, Juro’s and Stefania Passera’s privacy notice template uses design patterns that aim to meet GDPR’s requirement for such notices to be transparent and user-friendly.
The first thing the user sees on the notice’s page is the one-pager of the key facts of the notice. The information is displayed using an accessible layered approach. Juro’s co-founder, Richard Mabey, stated that they “decided early on that 80% of the information contained in a privacy notice could be conveyed on one page of a typical browser without scrolling.” This approach does indeed seem to work, as the launch of this solution led to a 13,000% increase in page views.
Experiencing the template
The template from Juro is found in GitHub and can be requested for free, so I requested the free template. Almost immediately, I got an email from “Richard from Juro” with instructions on how to get it. There were only three steps, and they were quite straightforward. However, two of them require the involvement of a developer. Since I am not one, I used my own knowledge of HTML to access the relevant demo file in the GitHub repository and opened it via browser.
I was pleased to see that Juro’s notice was indeed quite straightforward and user-centric. The formatting was clear, and there weren’t any large blocks of text most people would struggle to concentrate on. However, viewing the file does require some developer expertise or having the right resources on the payroll.
Overall, I’m pleased to see such successful implementation of legal design like Juro that’s born from a successful collaboration between a legal tech firm and a design professional. It’s the right step towards simplifying compliance and reducing legal costs for businesses and startups alike.
Photo credits: All shown images are owned by Juro and have been provided for press usage.
Sources: GitHub / ProductHunt / GDPR.eu / Richard Mabey (Artificial Lawyer)
