The UX of contract

You sign so many contracts in everyday life. But you aren’t even aware of it.

艾莉在路上 | Ellie On The Way

Published in

UX Collective

9 min readAug 27, 2019

Introduction

In this post, I’ll talk about what (institutional) contracts are in our daily life, what UX of contracts are like, what related problems we are facing that need to be solved, and what could be the solutions. Let’s start!

Contracts in Everyday Life

Maybe you don’t realize it, but your life is surrounded by a variety of contracts.

There are far more contracts than those you need to sign on paper or with electronic signatures. Any binding agreement with legal power though you might not see the formality, is considered a contract. That is to say, terms of service (ToS), terms of use, terms and conditions, privacy policies, cookie policies of any website or company are all contracts. Surprised? Since people are tend to ignore or not aware of these kinds of contracts, this article will mainly discuss the problems and solutions surrounding them.

UX of Contracts

Contracts constrain the rights and obligations of parties entering into an agreement. Users’ behaviors are shaped by contracts because they define what the users should do and how the users should interact with other parties. When contracts control users’ behaviors, they also shape users’ feelings and experience.

Current Problems about Contracts

When you first download and open an app, it always presents a window that asks you to agree with all the terms of service or you can’t use the product. Or, when you download software from the internet, such as Office 365 or Adobe applications, they show an End User License Agreement (EULA) that you also need to agree with in order to use the software.

In these situations, do you actually read these contracts?

It’s probably no surprise that most people don’t. As a natural reaction, people usually scroll to the bottom of the screen and just click “I agree to all the above.” Almost no one has ever read the whole contract carefully. At best, some people might scan them for a couple of minutes then skip over the rest. I know maybe you don’t care or don’t see it important. Yet, doing so can be dangerous because contracts constrain the exchange of rights. And when you sign something without reading, you don’t know what consequence you’ll be facing and what rights you’ll lose under certain conditions. Doesn’t it sound terrifying?

Another problem of current contract UX is that the language used in contracts is often too difficult to understand. This is also a reason that prevents many people from reading contracts. Maybe not for scholars or professionals but for the public, it’s far beyond daily life language use level. Both the grammar and words usage make most contracts hard to read. Because contracts are legal agreements, they need to look formal. Writers use legal terms and complicated grammar to express simple concepts. Also, this indirect way of communication makes contracts too long to read. Writers need to use harder, less common words and longer sentences to make it seem more like a “contract”. You hardly ever find a contract that can communicate itself in less than a single page. The above elements all make readers painful to read thoroughly.

For a more data-driven analysis of how difficult contracts in our daily life are, please see Kevin Litman-Navarro’s New York Times article that compares the length and readability of privacy policies from several popular websites and apps: We Read 150 Privacy Policies. They Were an Incomprehensible Disaster.

The vast majority of these privacy policies exceed the college reading level. (Source: We Read 150 Privacy Policies. They Were an Incomprehensible Disaster)

Additionally, this language problem is not only found in English; it’s a universal problem for different languages in different areas. Take Chinese for example. I am a Traditional Chinese native speaker and scored 14 out of 15 in the subject in a college entrance exam. However, whenever I see a contract, I still don’t feel delighted to read. It’s never possible for me to read every single word in only a few minutes.

If you don’t read contracts, you’re losing control over your rights.

Contracts constrain the exchange of rights. Like I said, most of the time, they are based on property rights. Especially for case like terms of service, cookie policy, privacy policy, the thing you give up will be property rights of your data.

Remember the scandal of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?

Netflix documentary The Great Hack

Isn’t it scary? Your data is controlled by big tech companies and you have no clue about where it goes or how it is used.

Similar situations also happen when you download apps: the terms and conditions ask to have access to your data in the phone. If you look into it carefully enough, you’ll likely be surprised to find that some photo filter apps ask to access your voice records, some game apps want access to your contacts, and even a sketchy spotlight app asks to access your photos. Why?

These apps sneakily hide access requirements in the contracts like terms of service, or ask for access not fit for the application. If people don't read and just click “agree” to every single term, then it's very possible that they share data without knowing. They might even authorize the app companies to use their data in ways such as selling it, and not realizing it at all — just from reckless clicking.

Once the data is leaked, you can’t protect it. You can’t decide where your data will go, you can’t decide who will see your data, you can’t decide how your data will be used. You can’t protect yourself. Your personal information is in danger. Your names, addresses, account numbers, passwords, ID numbers, payment info, birth date — all information will be open. They will know the things you like, the places you’ve been, the movies you watched, the websites you visited… You will have no privacy.

Possible Solutions

Contracts are rarely designed to be a delightful journey. Why don’t we make it different this time? If there’s one product that no one uses, maybe it doesn’t provide necessary function for users or it lacks good usability. Now, obviously, no one likes to read the contracts, since they are long and difficult. But if we make the whole process smoother and easier, maybe things will change.

I am recently working on a project called the Diabetes Data Trust. It’s a pioneering trust system for health data. As a data platform, data contributor can contribute their data to the trust, while researchers can access the data, and the data trust will ensure contributors’ data privacy is well-protected.

In the data trust, there’s a Contributor Agreement for contributors to learn about their rights and exactly what terms they are consenting to when they contribute their data. It’s a kind of contract. And my job is to create a new user experience for the users to understand the content of the contract easily.

Usually, designers don’t spend much time dealing with contracts. They work on onboarding section or product pages to attract users to use their products. How about the contract page? Sometimes it’s only mentioned in a line or two with a link that you can click to see the full version. Most often, it’s intentionally hidden for the purpose to get users enroll as soon as possible.

Most of my work for July consisted of designing a wireframe that breaks down the parts of the Contributor Agreement in the app UX to help users understand in a short time.

Diabetes Data Trust Contributor Agreement

Wireframe for Contributor Agreement on Balsamiq

The first three pages are extracted from the original contract. I made some graphs to explain, hoping that the pictures help users to understand at least 70% of the important concepts, even if they don’t read carefully. The fourth page is the full version of original contract, which shows users all the details for further understanding. After reading the whole document and scrolling down to the bottom, it will ask users one question about the contract to make sure they already have basic understanding about the contract. After the users read the contract, they can click “I fully understand and agree the agreement. Join.”. If they don’t want to join? They can leave immediately.

We combined the idea of ResearchKit from Apple and the concept of informed consent from medical industry to build the wireframe. (Check here to see What consent should look like when you share your data.) In the future, my mission also contains the improvement of user experience for Privacy Policies and Terms of Service. We hope to find the best UX solution, including interface and flow, for contracts. No matter whether there need to be graphs, animations, or videos to explain.

Another way will help directly is to decrease the difficulty of language level contracts use. Since contracts are legal agreements, they are composed of legal terms and grammar that are hard for normal people to read and understand. When people see the contracts, they see the jargons then give up reading. This is why I think we should make the contract language as easy as possible, yet of course still use correct words to convey the real idea as an improved method for communicating with users.

What can we do if people don’t read contracts? Well, we try to change their behavior from implementing the idea. Remember the lines from the movie Inception?

What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea.
A single idea from the human mind can build cities.
An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.
— <Inception>

Changing people’s behavior is one of the most effective way to solve the problem. And an idea is the strongest way to change human behavior.

One important function of UX work is to communicate. To communicate with users, or you can say “educate”. We want to convey the thoughts, and the value or things we believe in to people. That’s why I wrote this article to raise people’s awareness of minding what you’re signing and your rights in contracts. Because we believe, if people learn about the risks and importance of the behavior and grow the idea, they will take action to read in the future.

Conclusion

People interact with contracts everywhere in their daily lives but are probably not aware of how the contracts affect their lives. It is really important for users to understand the contract content they sign. They should read the terms and conditions carefully to learn the consequences of different behaviors, rather than just quickly skimming contracts without even knowing what would happen if someone breaks the terms.