Identity Theft Monitoring

Client Overview

FirstReport provides subscription based identity theft protection and monitoring service. They are partnered with one of the big five canadian banks. The project took about 9 months and was rolled out in 2 phases. In phase 1, we redesigned and launched the on-boarding experience. In phase 2, we shipped the post-login experience.

My Role

Product Designer at Intersect working alongside the UX Lead of the project. I was responsible for the end-to-end experience including a component guide (WCAG 2.0 compliant). I will focus on the dashboard experience (in phase 2) in this case study.

Analyze Current Experience

Low customer-perceived value

We started by understanding the client’s business goals and challenges. One of their primary goals was to increase user engagement. We also heard that 56% of people quit the product because they didn't see the foundational value, why?

To understand the customer's goals and their contexts of use, we recruited 20 current customers and 20 cancelled customers and asked them about their experiences with the product. I also mapped out the customer journey to identify what users do and their pain points. Both the product usage data and initial customer interviews showed that people didn't understand the full scope of the product.

  • 72% of dashboard behaviour was driven to Credit Reporting & Credit Scores.
  • Only 1.5% of customers who paid for monitoring actually ended up adding more elements to monitor such as their driver license.

User goal

As a paid customer, I want to always stay on top of my personal information, so that I can detect possible identity fraud sooner.

Project objectives

The dashboard is the main entry point to the monitoring service. Improving the usefulness and intuitiveness of the dashboard would directly impact the product engagement.

  • Give the customers the impression that the product is working for them 24/7.
  • Help the customers to get the most out of their subscriptions.
  • Motivate the customers to be more proactive in protecting their identities.

My Approaches

Demonstrate everything the product does behind the scenes

In order to help users understand how it works, one approach I took was to illustrate what the product does behind the scenes from 3 angles: 1- the number of pages scanned daily to detect any suspicious activity. 2- the number of new pages added in the last month. 3- the total alerts issued last month.

The client really liked it, but along the way I needed to balance those educational pieces with the user's personal data and the product’s upselling features, so I revisited the importance of displaying all the three counters (the first two counters above) and decided to remove the webpage counts. I chose to do this because among those 3 counters, the alerts issued would imply to the customers that the product is actually finding real cases of fraud. It’s not just scanning pages endlessly with zero results.

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↑ Iterations of the dashboard page

Surface the most relevant insights

I believed that in order to create an informational and actionable dashboard, it needed to answer users' questions as "how is my personal info doing?" and "what should I do now?"

  • A snapshot of the customer’s current status.
  • The ability to review alerts and to bring up more details, so that the customer is in the know and take action immediately whenever the system detects activity that could be the earliest indication of identity fraud.
  • Relevant industry updates such as major breaches.
  • Highlight the available features in the customer's subscription that the customer hasn't utilized yet.

↑ Dashboard design

To make sure the dashboard was easy to scan, I often asked myself: Were the most important information prioritised? How did these cards look individually and how did they look displayed beside each other?

I also utilized hallway testing and our weekly product reviews with the broader product team to test the arrangment of all the pieces. This helped me refine the design to achieve prominence for important elements and balance for the overall layout.

Present easy access to add/edit elements

Takeover modal is employed when a user edit monitoring items from "Quick Access" section as you can see below. Takeover modal enables a user to interact with a complex form while having the ability to go back to their previous view quickly.

↑ Adding more items to be monitored

Production Designs

Leverage component guide

Once the product moved on to the build phase, we needed to turn the prototype into a production-ready design, which meant I needed to provide the designs for all the variations for different scenarios. I didn’t want to create 1000 screens to capture all the variant components. So I leveraged the component guide to explain which component should be used for which scenario, so the engineers could derive the screen design they were looking for on their own.

↑ Examples of alternate contexts (scenarios) for the same component

↑ WIP of component guide

Post Launch

Results and takeaways

The revamped experience was well received and we handed off the designs and code base to the client. The client launched the product 8 months later. Here is a quick video of the live product with some of its key features that I mentioned above.

↑ A quick video of the live product

I left the company before the post-login experience was launched. But if I had more time, I would like to discuss with the team and see how should we measure the success:

  • The number of monitored elements per user
  • The elements that users are least likely to add
  • How often the users sign in

The above metrics would be targeted at the users who have yet to take full advantage of their subscriptions. I would track all of these metrics on a monthly basis to compare month-to-month progress.

I also would like to continue thinking about how to continually educate customers and build customer trust. Essentially, the decision of how to protect oneself from identity theft comes down to peace of mind and trust. One one hand, FirstReport service sells the promise of fewer worry-filled nights. One the other hand, trust is important too. It's worth remembering that in order to sign up for these services, you have to hand over the very information that you want protected. That might be too much to ask, even for me.