Imagining the meeting at Boots HQ where someone approved this.
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— Leisa Reichelt (@leisa) June 22, 2015

You can imagine how this went down.

The lawyers decided that the privacy policy needed updating, so they updated it and put it on the website.

Then they decided that they had to make sure people knew about it. Who knows why… I can only imagine because they’re actually starting to do something that they know people probably won’t really be happy with (or they’re beginning to admit that’s what they’re doing), so they need to prove that a certain number of customers knew about it.

They say, ‘put a sign up in the stores, we have to do this because this is a risk to the business. It could damage our brand and cost a fortune in law suits’.

No one wants to be the person who is putting the company at risk and responsible for lawsuits, so they don’t ask any questions except for what is the cheapest and easiest way to meet the lawyers’ needs.

I imagine the email the lawyers sent (it would totally have been an email and not a meeting), the meeting to discuss what to do about the lawyers email, all the emails to argue about which type of signage they’d use, what would get bumped so this sign could exist, arguing over the wording. And finally, the meeting where someone approved this.

And so it is that, as I go to buy some paracetamol, I am informed that the privacy policy has changed and I can find out about this on the website.

I wonder – is this just the website privacy policy, or the Boots loyalty card privacy policy, are those the same things or different?

I wonder – how many people would pull out their phones or rush back to their desks to find out what changes have been made (I did… I couldn’t resist. There’s nothing to draw your attention to this information on their website and the section on privacy doesn’t make any reference to recent changes). Even if I do want to find out about the changes to this policy, I can’t see how on earth I might meet that need on their website.

I wonder – did they think about how it would make people feel or act to see this.

I wonder – did anyone fight for this not to happen? They probably did. Fear won.

I wonder – if a law suit did come up, could Boots actually prove that this has sufficiently informed people of the change to the privacy policy? Probably not.

I wonder – what opportunities were lost to actually understand the end user need and design a way of meeting that need in a way that benefitted the relationship between Boots and their customers.

You see these little things that companies do, you can see that all they’re doing is ‘ticking a box’, a token effort for the lawyers or whoever else, and you know that they’re pushing the burden onto the customer, and probably missing gigantic opportunities to be really great.

Fixing the crazy way things like this happen is at least as important as designing the shiny signs and the websites.