Communicating Simply: The Grandma and Child Test
During my time working on Privacy, it was extremely difficult for people to understand what they were signing up for. Privacy is built on core principles like purpose limitation, transparency, proportionality, and accountability. But the one that mattered most in practice was the simplicity test.

If a grandparent and a ten-year-old can explain your privacy narrative back to you in plain language, you've reached simplicity. If they can't, you haven't thought clearly enough about what you're doing. Complexity is usually a cover for something that wouldn't survive scrutiny.

This test forced clarity about what a product actually did for people. It cut through the internal justifications, the legal hedging, and the feature-level rationalizations. If the explanation was too long or easy to misconstrue, no one would read it. Which meant it wasn't working.

That connects to another principle I use: people don't read subtext. They read the first five bolded words. If your new user experience is a wall of text, nobody reads anything but the first few words and whatever image is on screen. And they'll interpret that however they want.

We saw this firsthand with Messenger when explaining end-to-end encryption. The original explanation walked users through how encryption worked, but users don't care about the technicality. They just want to know their data is protected. That their messages aren't being read.

Simple isn't dumbed down. Simple is the proof that you actually understand what you're doing.