Contextual Inquiry – Onboarding a cyber security platform with independent financial advisors (June 2019)

Our Impact

In just over 3 months, 3,000 users successfully implemented our product by using Quickstart, a self-onboarding wizard for the Workplace platform.

“That was the smoothest rollout of new software our company has ever had.” 

– Largest client rollout in company history

Research Overview

User Panel

7 employees in an independent financial advisor office in South Carolina, aligned with existing personae

My role

Senior User Researcher

Methodology

• Personas (the Producer, the Pleaser, and the Enforcer)

• Contextual inquiry (in client’s SC office)

• 1:1 Interviews

Background

My company, OS33, is the market leading cloud security and compliance platform for investment advisory firms, broker dealers and insurance companies with independent agents, representatives and advisors. The name of our product is Workplace.

We’d recently won a contract with its first enterprise client, Voya, which meant we would be required to launch to exponentially more users in a shorter time. It was vital that each user onboard themselves independently. We designed a wizard and called it Quickstart. 

How might we create a way for 3,000 independent Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) and their support staff to download, install, and protect client data using our product without experiencing a gap in productivity?

Objectives

We wanted to learn how our client’s clients would experience the onboarding process using the Quickstart self-onboarding tool, so we found a Voya RIA in South Carolina who would be willing to be our “guinea pig.” My colleague and I flew down, spent two days in the office and learned some amazing things!

We anticipated friction for people who would be asked to use their personal mobile device in the 2 factor authentication process at work. We wanted to see how they would react to the news that they would be downloading a native app to their work computer and be required to authenticate on their phone by downloading yet another app. We were also curious how they’d react to a new security requirement - a platform that would likely make significant changes to the way they did their jobs.

• How do users experience the different stages of becoming a Workplace user, from the initial on boarding workflow to becoming compliant on all connected devices? 

• How do people experience the on boarding flow as a new customer?

• How do company compliance managers experience the on boarding flow as a new customer?

• Learn about the end-to-end experience for end users using Quickstart to on board Workplace

• Learn about pain points as well as peak experiences for end users who align with the Workplace personas (Producer, Enforcer, and Pleaser) and provide areas for improvement with subsequent enterprise contracts

It was a delicate situation. My colleague and I had competing goals: as a customer service rep, he wanted to facilitate the process for our customers, while I was there to find out how customers would experience the on boarding process unaided.

The process started with end users opening an email invitation from the compliance manager of the company, inviting them to become a Workplace user. From there, they would download the app in a browser and the app would direct them to the next steps - create an account, create a password, download the mobile app to your personal device and register that device within the native app. We hoped that users would understand that to be compliant, they would be required to access the internet via the Workplace native app - forever.

Observations

From watching this group of 5-6 people with broadly varying levels of tech sophistication, we observed a few key problems - no one (other than Microsoft Edge users) was able to complete the Workplace app download, at several stages of the process, users were unsure of what action was required of them., and everyone expressed annoyance at being required to use their personal mobile device for a work related task.

Most alarmingly, we immediately observed that the Workplace app would not download in any browser except Microsoft Edge or our proprietary “secure browser.” Users were unable to successfully complete the flow because the download was stopped. Obviously this would be a huge problem if we didn’t fix it.

A World Record – quickest research Readout ever!

When I returned to the office in NYC, all the stakeholders gathered in a room and I delivered the findings on a whiteboard! It made us all laugh, but we had very little time and this ultra-quick delivery was what enabled leadership to sprint to our developers and outline the necessary changes. (Needless to say, we made a more appropriate deliverable to keep in the archive for posterity.)

1. Requiring users to download and use our proprietary secure browser (or Microsoft Edge) proved to be a difficult process for people, often precluding the onboarding process.
   Limiting users to the Edge Browser (secure, internally built) prevented all users from completing the on boarding flow. Unless they could download and use other browsers, our help center would be overwhelmed with calls!

1. New users were angry that they would be required to use their personal mobile device in the 2 factor authentication process during login for a work-required security platform.
   Since we couldn’t change that requirement, we attempted to provide more education for users about how the process worked at each step. We also added information about what our app could / could not see about their personal data and behavior.

2. We discovered that a required link to the next step of the flow was inaccessible - obscured by the iPhone keyboard when users clicked on the field to begin typing.
   This was an easy fix! We adjusted the layout.

solution: quickstart, a helpful wizard

We decided that a wizard would be a better way to help users through the onboarding process. Our dev team created one that we tested during 5 remote usability testing sessions with current users.

Usability Test Findings

The following screens were part of a report that was emailed immediately after we tested the first iteration of the Quickstart onboarding wizard. They show each screen as well as my annotations about observations, quotes, and recommendations.