Identity Theft Monitoring: UX Research leading Growth →
A bit about the process of UX Research, Incremental builds, and Subscription growth.
As the Lead UX of DFNDR Security at Psafe in early 2019, I was given the challenge of understanding what Android users in USA were concerned about considering mobile security how we as a company could offer real solutions for them.
In case you never heard of Psafe, here is some context:
Until that time, some of the most successful experiences Psafe offered where based on a "Antivirus and Cleaning" coming from a legacy of desktop use, and, in times of Cambridge Analytica scandal and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), it seemed that the mobile security environment was really changing as this subjects were more and more breaking the news and finding a place into our public daily conversations.
So our first intent was to begin somewhere beyond our assumptions, and hear from the users. Or, what I would call "leaning on the User window".
Using our in-app research feature we managed to collect Quantitative Data on the themes who needed more reception, finding spots that were not yet well covered by similar products.
Also, using the platform UserTesting.com we launched a Daily Discoveries project within our team, so we would everyday hear users talk, looking for validation of some of the hypothesis we had at the beginning and getting a clear emotional view on the subject.
Even though we started to have a map of user feelings, we realised that we needed to get the details right in order to have strong hypothesis and a good starting point, before the next efforts. So the plan was to refine the questions based on the insights, and recruit some of the most enthusiast users to a Customer Panel, where we would get great Qualitative insights to adapt and build up our hypothesis, or at the stage, our so called "Super Hypothesis".
We've done the Customer Panel in a very cheap way, using separated Whatsapp conversations, pushing questions and encouraging them to send audios and videos, keeping the conversation flowing. That way we really got to know their stories of abuses using their personal data, through fake apps, stolen credit cards, stolen accounts and so on.
With all this information, we've put into place our Personas and Journey map so they would be a totem in our office reminding us that every decision must be suitable to these subjectivities.
After that, we decided to choose one of the concepts to wireframe and prototype, releasing a quick usability test to get feedback as soon as possible.
After a few rounds of iteration, we agreed with all stakeholders (Product Manager, Lead Dev, Product Director, Product Marketing) that we had an MVP of our feature ready to go to production.
While the MVP was very simple, it was enough to prove our concept successful, having a good first impact, a green flag for our subscription team!
So the first tests we did with the feature on production, using UserTesting.com, we got to hear about the path that we should keep building, the ideas that pushed us to the next stage of the feature: Monitoring.
After the release of Monitoring, we observed a increase in 7-day trials that and Retention increase among Premium Subscribers.
After the release of Monitoring, we observed an increase in 7-day trials that and Retention increase among Premium Subscribers.
Having that going in a good direction, we decided to tackle our 2nd Super Hypothesis, which was to offer a solution about Personal Data advices, considering the apps installed, permissions given, and a risk advice upon it. Soon enough, we saw the close relation this could have to our "monitoring for breaches" previous launch Identity Theft Monitoring, and how the new "App Privacy Scan", could be another motive for purchasing a 24/7 watchman.
Also, it was time to keep advancing on the illustrations and giving life to some of them, using Lottie animations.
In time, we really started to see some traction on the new solid Premium Experience, which in a couple of months later, made us see a big potential on a iOS App launch with these premium features looking to expand the reach of this technology to a new environment.
Being in a largely used product (15MAU) makes it really fun to see how fast many people interact with your design and taking advantage of this user feedback generated this case that, in my opinion, could be a model for User-research-driven product and companies.
