Case Study: Account Verification
Account verification adds an extra layer of security by alerting users when a new device or browser tries to log in and access their account.
Account verification adds an extra layer of security by alerting users when a new device or browser tries to log in and access their account.
Every person using SurveyMonkey should have their own account and login credentials, even if that account is part of a team (a group of accounts that share common data and features). By looking at usage trends in our system, we estimated that around 45% of our users were sharing accounts. When users share account logins it creates data, security, and identity issues for the people and businesses using our product. Additionally, it's sort of like buying one donut but taking the whole dozen back to the office for you and your co-workers.
Account verification adds an extra layer of security to peoples' accounts by alerting them when a new device or browser tries to log in and access their data. When each user has an individual account protected with account verification, users and admins can be sure that the person signing in is the person that should be signing in.
Lead Product Designer
Workshops, cross-functional connection and communication, user research, ui design, process flows, usability testing
July 2018 - November 2018 for Design to release to first cohort (10% of 'high sharers')
July 2018 - July 2019 for complete rollout to all SurveyMonkey users
Ultimately, this security feature would hit every user of SurveyMonkey. So we had to think across our users types.
Non-SSO secured large teams, 25 or more, that were on-boarded with sales assistance.
Teams of 3 to 25 that handle all of their billing and team management themselves through the product.
1 person working with SurveyMonkey. Could be anyone.
Since we were dealing with sign up flows, we wanted to make sure anything we introduced was an improvement to security. This required us to understand some of these folks better.
Email Verification Illustrating the effects of this constraint went a long way in communicating upwardly the experiential impact of not addressing the issue with our design solution. It also helped explain why we had to make certain decisions in our flows, and take extra precaution in our testing.
The key to taking this problem from discovery to understanding was robust cross-functional collaboration.
Bringing everyone together from security to legal and marketing, we cbroke up into 2 groups and workshopped. The goal was to define what the benefit to the uer was for the feature, where the gaps were, and to gather incoming feedback from our cross functional partners.
Created process flows and wireframes to look at the flows in orderCaptured institutional knowledge, and concerns from across functions
Just as important to understand what would happen in our flows on the screen, was understanding what was happening off the screeen. What actions might prompt an uptick in customer calls? What is the impact of this? We haddto work closely with proiduct and CS to make sure the right real-life flows were in place to capture feedback ad n
As the discovery phase started to become and understanding of the problem, and the creation of a few proposed solutions. When we landed on device verification, I dove in deep to create process flows that outlined all possible areas the flow would connect, on and offline. These were used across the organization to start outlining the scope of the problem, communicate it to others, and allowed us to start exploring our options.
Using our current styles, we came up with a relatively seamless flow that informs users, introduces the feature first-hand, and presents promotional options for users who feel they should modify their accounts.
We'd done some initial validation of our intended device verification flows early on and through iteration. Although, we still had a few questions heading out of the design phase that we wanted to answer. In particular, we collaborated with Customer Support to create a "skip" feature that would allow users to come through the flow a limited number of times before the feature limit their access.
We validated this approach in a few ways:
After release, we kept in close contact with Customer Support to make sure we were reacting to feedback from users. Partnering with Product Management, we prioritized a few important updates directly from what we learned from users in those first few weeks:
Account Veritfication helped our recently released team plans take off. The simple flows, and seemless integration with customer support and upgrade flows allowed our teams to make the choices that were right for them, and helped us as a business in our goal to get each individual on to their own accounts.
teams in one year
over projections
Rolled out to all non-SSO users in 1 year
Greater data security for our teams
