We have learned over time that we develop products not for us the company, but for you, the customer, to help resolve your problems. But just resolving a customer’s problem is not enough – the product should also be intuitive and easy to use.
It’s clear that the best people to provide feedback about the ease of use of a product are our customers. Therefore, we want our customers to become our design partners.
This blog is about how customers’ feedback shaped our Account Takeover Protection product, which identifies and defends customers from malicious cyber attacks.
First, let’s review what makes a product easy to use.
What is good UX?
Optimum user experience is shaped by three questions:
- Does it require minimum effort from the user?
- Does it enable the user to achieve the expected result?
- Does the user understand the result?
We’ve learned that the best way to ensure we hit these marks is to bring our customers on as partners in the early stages of the design process.
The Account Takeover Protection design process
Our challenge
The major UX design challenge in our Account Takeover Protection product was the dashboard screen for use by Security Administrators. This dashboard should give users an at-a-glance assessment of their account security status:
- Identifying an attack attempt
- Showing the impact of an attack
- Suggesting the action required
The dashboard also points to additional details of the account takeover (ATO), enabling the security admin to refine system settings and mitigate future ATO attempts.
Conceptual design
After a series of brainstorming sessions with our development and product teams, we created our first conceptual design for the Account Takeover Dashboard, and we were ready to discuss it with our design partners and get their initial feedback.
Figure 1: Initial Wireframe Dashboard Our first dashboard sketch shows the user’s website status before the ATO mitigation process is activated.
Conceptual design to interactive prototype
At this stage, we fine-tuned our design direction with Imperva Sales Engineers whose experience with customers in the field – particularly with ATO attacks – was invaluable.
Figure 2:
The Account Takeover Protection Dashboard prototype that was tested. The screen was split into tabs to prevent data overloading of the user.
Usability sessions over prototype
At this stage, we brought on board our first customers as design partners.
By this point, we’d created the research study protocol reflecting our research goals, user task scenarios, and our methodology for gathering user feedback.
Our research goals were to answer the following questions:
- Does the user understand the Account Takeover Protection dashboard?
- Does the dashboard contain all the required information?
- Is the dashboard overloaded?
- Does the user understand the impact of ATO attempts on the business?
- Does the user understand key terms? (e.g. “mitigated”, “account takeover”, “suspicious”)
- Does the user understand the dashboard KPIs?
Next, we conducted a moderated test – a face-to-face session with each of our design partners. We asked them to complete different tasks as we measured task completion times. They were asked to “think out loud” and to complete a questionnaire afterward.
The feedback from this questionnaire was extremely valuable, allowing us to iterate and then test an improved design.
Beta stage
Next, we released a Beta and reached out to more customers in order to get their feedback.
Figure 3:
The Account Takeover Protection Dashboard in Beta release.
Production stage
Finally, it was time for the ATO product release! Of course, this release doesn’t mean an end to the design process – our teams continue to gather customer feedback in order to improve our product and support our customers.
Figure 4:
The result of the Beta release – the Account Takeover Protection Dashboard.
Conclusion
Clearly, customer involvement and feedback are critical to the success of our design process. Comparing the initial mockup and the current design, it’s easy to see customer impact on the final product, which enables users to complete required tasks with minimum time and effort.
At Imperva, we work hard to build product experiences that fulfil our customers’ true needs.
Your partnership and your feedback are a huge factor in our success.
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