Shaping product & UX strategy
Why was a new strategy needed?
McAfee had decades of success providing desktop computer security for millions of customers worldwide. Market research and trends analysis indicated that users’ habits were shifting to spending more time browsing. In response, the product had to shift to letting users’ live their lives more confidently online, across all devices.
How research shaped product and UX strategy
Research approach
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Build customer empathy
synthesizing previous research studies (ethnographies, customer segmentation work, JBTD, user interviews, surveys) to surface what our customers understood about security, how they engaged with and their understanding of what McAfee did to protect them.
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Assess the current state of UX
End to end journey mapping through UX audits using a mix of heuristic evaluations, usability testing with a task focus and card sorting to assess if the information architecture was surfacing up the features customers valued the most.
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Benchmark against competition
Security products operate in a mature space with a few key competitors. We hired a vendor (for legal reasons) to audit competitive experiences.
What research synthesis uncovered?
Unclear value: Customers were uncertain of the value McAfee provided and most of potential purchasers in the <40 years age group thought McAfee wasn’t necessary for them and was more suitable for the senior citizens.
Diverse mental models: We served a diverse group of users with different mental models about how they wanted to interact with security.
Overall, security was not something they wanted to think about, purchasing specialized security software was the price they paid for ‘worry free browsing’.
Security was expected to be an invisible service: Most didn’t care to learn about security, they simply wanted to set it and forget it, unless an urgent intervention was required. Others wanted an easy, on-demand way to reassure themselves that McAfee was working actively.
Poster to make insights based UX direction memorable
Leveraged a blend of qualitative and quantitative research
What the UX Audit uncovered?
Disconnected products: 1 for desktop, 1 for mobile and 1 for the browser with very patchy intersection points.
Onboarding & Engagement: Users were encouraged to purchase the product and let it run on their machines. No attempt was made to explain the various protection features, engage users, and get them to interact with the product.
Renewal: communication around renewal consisted of a series of messages, both in product and over email, reminding people who had not signed up for auto-renewal that renewal was due.
Research learnings led to the creation of the following product and UX strategy.
Products had to work across devices and experiences had to be personalized and contextual.
Users had to understand our protection features and engage with them.
The security market was very commoditized, we had to differentiate using our experiences.
Video to inspire through UX score
Kudos: Larry Butcher, Brand and UX Director, led the creation of an in-house team with US-based Principal Product Designer Brent Dietrich and Australian Visual and Motion Designer Mel de Beer. This video was used to tell the story of a future vision of McAfee that is just one unified product, and that creates upsell experiences, in context, to demonstrate value to the user.