Beyond compliance: improving cookie consent notice comprehension and usability through design science research

Purpose Cookie consent notices frequently fail to communicate data practices clearly or support genuine privacy choices. This study aims to improve user comprehension of website data practices and the usability of consent decisions in the South African context, where the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) mandates informed consent for cookie-based data collection. Design/methodology/approach Design science research (DSR) was used across three iterative build-and-evaluate cycles. A typology of cookie consent notice designs was derived from the 100 most popular South African websites. The DSR artefact was refined through expert usability evaluation (n = 5), a large-scale online experiment comparing comprehension and usability against the typology (n = 320) and a between-subjects validation study (n = 275). Twenty-three empirically, theoretically and legally grounded design specifications guided development. Findings Most existing South African cookie consent notices performed poorly on privacy comprehension and usability. The DSR artefact performed as well as or better than prevalent South African designs across most communication and usability measures, with statistically significant advantages on specific measures, though not uniformly across all iterations and outcomes. Labelled icons facilitated long-term retention of data practices, consistent with multimedia learning theory. However, third-party data sharing remained poorly understood regardless of notice design, suggesting terminology, not just visual design, may be a barrier worth testing directly in future work. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first empirical baseline for cookie consent communication and usability in South Africa, an open-source POPIA-compliant artefact and 23 reusable design specifications. It extends multimedia learning theory to consent notice design and surfaces a possible boundary condition distinguishing structural from terminological comprehension barriers, motivating future work to test this distinction directly.