Co-designing employees' data privacy: A technology consultancy company use case

Employee data is increasingly becoming crucial for organisations to improve workflow and foresight. Furthermore, with the onset of the GDPR law, the MyData movement is pushing for human-centric personal data. This presents an opportunity not only to improve how employees can understand their data, but also have transparency and control over it. This paper investigates how a collaborative design process was used at a technology consultancy company to design a service aimed at enabling data transparency and control as well as at communicating its value. We collected qualitative data from a survey, interviews, and workshops conducted with employees. We then built a prototype and tested its usability using a questionnaire. Results showed a clear need among participants for transparency. Results also showed the effectiveness of the prototype in positively enhancing transparency and in generating a good level of usability. The adopted process also led to the formulation of data categories to improve the service's comprehensiveness. Taken together, our results highlight how the proposed model of co-creative design may aid complex transformations in large technology organisations. We provide a set of recommendations in this space and envision future directions for our study.