Increasing user attention with a comic-based policy

Abstract

End user license agreements, terms of service agreements and privacy policies all suffer from many of the same problems: people rarely read them and yet still agree to whatever is contained within them. There are many usability challenges with these policies: they are often lengthy, with jargon filled language that is difficult to quickly comprehend. However, these notices are the primary tool for users to understand the privacy implications of their digital activities and make informed decisions on which websites and software they use. Prior research has explored alternative designs for such notices, using more visual and structured interfaces for conveying information. We expand upon these results by exploring a comic-based interface, examining whether it can engage users to pay more attention to a terms of service agreement. Our results indicate that the comic version did hold user attention for longer than text-based alternatives, encouraging deeper investigation into comic-based interfaces.