Scrollytelling as an Alternative Format for Privacy Policies

Paper Title

Scrollytelling as an Alternative Format for Privacy Policies

Publication Info

• Topic area: Privacy policy communication and user comprehension
• Keywords: Privacy policies, scrollytelling, user engagement, comprehension, narrative visualization, cognitive load, transparency, trust, interactive design, usability

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Privacy policies are often long, complex, and difficult to read, leading to low user engagement and poor comprehension. Existing alternative formats, such as nutrition labels and interactive tools, have shown mixed effectiveness and limited adoption.
• Significance: Improving privacy policy communication is critical for informed consent, user trust, and transparency in data practices.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has explored condensed overviews, icons, interactive Q&A systems, and privacy nutrition labels. While these approaches improve usability, they often involve trade-offs such as omitted nuance or increased cognitive load. Narrative techniques like scrollytelling have been successful in other domains, but their potential for privacy policies remains unexplored.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Scrollytelling—a scroll-driven narrative format that integrates animated visuals with full-text privacy policies to create an engaging and structured reading experience.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduction of scrollytelling as a novel format for privacy policy communication.
  2. Development of a prototype combining narrative guidance with policy-faithful exploration.
  3. Empirical comparison of scrollytelling against textual, tabular, and visualization-only formats across comprehension, experience, and perception outcomes.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Design goals: Preserve legal fidelity, scaffold comprehension, support orientation, enable verification, and balance overview with selective inquiry.
  • Interface features: Split-screen layout with synchronized text and animations, progressive disclosure, visual explanations of data flows, and interactive summaries.
  • Evaluation: A between-subjects online study (N = 454) comparing scrollytelling to four alternative formats (text, nutrition label, nutrition label + text, interactive visualization).

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Comprehension accuracy for scrollytelling was high (75.5%) and statistically indistinguishable from most formats, except for the nutrition label (78.1%).
  • Scrollytelling improved subjective experience, including engagement, enjoyment, and perceived clarity, while reducing cognitive load compared to text.
  • Pre–post shifts in perceived transparency, trust, and understanding were small and statistically inconclusive across all formats.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Scrollytelling outperformed text on subjective experience measures and matched it on comprehension accuracy and completion time.
  • The interactive visualization, when shown without narrative scaffolding, required more time without improving comprehension.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Participants reviewed one of two real-world privacy policies (OpenAI or TikTok) in one of five formats.
  • Metrics included comprehension accuracy, confidence, subjective experience (e.g., engagement, cognitive load), and pre–post perception shifts.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited power for format × owner interactions and no direct testing of real-world decision-making impacts.
  • Future research should explore within-subject comparisons, mobile adaptations, and behavioral outcomes (e.g., changes in privacy settings).

Summary

This paper introduces scrollytelling as a novel format for presenting privacy policies, combining narrative pacing with visual explanations to enhance user engagement and comprehension. In a study with 454 participants, scrollytelling matched or exceeded other formats in comprehension and significantly improved subjective experience over plain text. While comprehension gains were modest, scrollytelling demonstrated potential as a practical and engaging alternative for privacy communication. Future work should address scalability, real-world deployment, and behavioral impacts.