“
October 2017
I want to keep going.
I want to make this
90 score into a 100.
— User during usability testing
Insights
Lessons
Keep it simple
Pivot early, pivot often
Research is your friend
Research is important
Language is important
The client wanted their customers to be more proactive about their online security.
Identisafe provides identity theft protection. They offer education and awareness information through their blog, newsletter, website FAQ, and social media. However, their current customers weren’t taking action about their own security in meaningful ways.
Guesses without research are just guesses
At first, we thought people didn’t know how important it was to be proactive about their online security because the company had a lot of educational material available. Originally, we thought the material wasn’t reaching people.
The research steered us right
Survey information and user interviews revealed that people were well aware. They just didn’t do anything about it. And they had a lot of reasons for why they didn’t do anything.
Which method are you aware of?
Aha?
Based on our user research, we realized our problem wasn’t about awareness.
Or…
We had a lot of responses such as, “I’m lazy,” “I’m stupid,” “I’m busy.” On the surface, these responses seem to point to a lack of motivation. However, these responses were covering deeper feelings of fear and shame.
Really!
The real problem was fear and shame.
People were so afraid that they didn’t do anything about it. Or if they had been a victim in the past, they felt a lot of shame for not doing anything.
Our solution
Motivate the user
Make it easy for the user
Reward the user
Because of that fear and shame, we knew we needed to start with small steps. We just needed to get people to try just one thing and feel really great about it.
We took inspiration from Fogg’s case study about a healthcare company wanting to help people reduce their stress by picking a smaller target behavior.
Start with something easy
So, we used a feature prioritization to figure out what would give us high impact, but require low effort for the user.
We concluded that getting users to change their passwords was the easiest task for them to do because it required little time and effort.
Teamwork FTW!
We were able to successfully play on our individual strengths to divide and conquer some parts of the project and collaborate on other parts — diverge and converge.
We knew the problem and our solution, and we knew we needed to view things from our user’s needs. So, we created our user flow together.
Are the students’ needs being met?
Once we had our user flow, we looked at the current app.
We could see what was working and what wasn’t working for our persona.
But not really.
There were things not working like not being able to complete most tasks on the app.
Maybe?
There was some good stuff going on like the interface being simple and the ability to receive notifications.
Check out the competition
We looked at competitors to see what motivations and actions were helping our Users.
A clear progress bar showed improvement and helped motivate and encourage users.
A high rating score with the word, “excellent” is encouraging.
Wireframes & Prototype
We created low fidelity wireframes and a prototype for our usability tests.
Motivation
We included the already existing notifications to help motivate users to action.
Ease of use
We included easy to understand call to actions and clear directions.
reward
We included rewarding feedback with a success screen and increased the safety score in green.
Headed in the right direction!
Good news! We tested the prototype with some vexed victims, and the results were great. We got people so motivated that they wanted to keep going.
Our use of gamification techniques were very effective in building motivation while still being subtle and not over the top gimmicky.
“Oh wow, I feel like I can easily understand how to improve my security. This feels
very empowering.”
After the initial sprint
After our 2-week sprint was over, I cleaned up the wireframes and incorporated the feedback we received from the usability tests. I took more time to make high-fidelity wireframes.
