Overview
As a UX researcher, I am often called to help consult on initial intake conversations between product and design in order to determine potential research needs. The conversation around this feature was limited to product and design stakeholders; I used this as an opportunity to not only conduct additional testing around the feature in question but to also widen the scope of stakeholders in order to build broaden alignment.
The Challenge
A product manager wanted to initiate design work around an authentication roadblock that many customers were running up against. Data showed that only about one-third of customers who experienced the added security roadblock successfully passed it. The limitations that customers experienced on access to their account drove a lot of calls to our call center.
As a UX researcher, I saw two goals for the project:
Gather user feedback on current implementation and other available approaches.
Utilize a cross-functional design thinking workshop to build empathy around customer pain points and gain alignment on a solution.
Role
I worked as the sole UX researcher to collaborate with our product partner before design was engaged in order to build context for the potential solution.
Tools
Google Drive, InVision, Usertesting.com, Keynote, JIRA, Aha!
Consultation
I often ask our partners to provide motivating data/information at our initial consultation in order to identify opportunities for additional insights. The data available regarding this authentication roadmap was limited for a subset of our customer base. While it provided success rate for those customers, we did not have a clear picture about when and why customers were unable to bypass the roadblock.
It also became clear in the conversation that while design and product were mostly aligned on the need, other stakeholders in security and legal were not onboard with the burgeoning hypothesis of allowing easier authentication given both security protocols and privacy regulations. In order to build enough time to involve those stakeholders, I very quickly worked with the product manager to begin including legal and security in the process and ensure their attendance at our upcoming workshop.
Comparative Testing
We had agreed that a primary outcome of this work would be facilitating a design-thinking workshop in order to determine potential solution candidates. My past experience with workshops taught me that those conversations are only as good as the motivating information presented. Data helped support groups to break out of pre-conceived notions and assuming that they themselves were the customer.
In this case, we had access to three solutions already in production to test against. For this comparative testing, I created three prototypes to approximate the experience and launched unmoderated sessions to gather user feedback.
Testing revealed clear customer preferences around being informed of the need for the additional authentication, as well as ease of authentication.
Workshop
Outside of the cold results from the testing, the most impacting results were a series of videos capturing customer feedback about current implementation.
The main goals of the workshop were to identify customer problem statements and to priorities hypothesis statements. In order to generate those, I shared the information we had available and also created a video reel to help that data come alive and build empathy.
The inclusion of all of the stakeholders also helped build alignment across teams that did not always collaborate in such a way. I facilitated activities that mixed participants together and helped foster the working team that would develop the feature in the end.
Outcome
In the end, the team prioritized a hypothesis that required a reinterpretation of the regulation, and also an adjustment to the company’s security protocol that ultimately made authentication easier for customers.
The empathy that was generated by the testing, and the cross-functional collaboration of the workshop created an opportunity for a better customer experience, and also a smoother development process.