Sign in and security

As a part of a larger effort to overhaul our product experience to further develop trust with our members, I lead the research and redesign of the authentication services (logging in and out) at Trust & Will. The initial indicator that we needed improvements in this area came from our back end development team, who had identified a high number of errors stemming from our log in and sign up forms.

After digging into the data, watching user sessions, and speaking with members directly, we found that there was a general feeling of uncertainty being created during our authentication process which included concerns about security, confusion around error messaging, and a general lack of certainty around account creation. During this research phase, I also ran a general survey (not limited to our current members) around security and user perception of trustworthiness when interacting with tools online. Our findings all pointed to a few keys points where we could improve, including clarity of messaging, ease of account creation, and additional security options (2FA/MFA).

Once we had established some of our target improvement metrics, I lead the effort to redesign our entire authentication flow. This meant balancing user clarity in messaging and feedback with proper web security best-practices so as to protect our larger user database from bad actors. Of course, this was also an opportunity to do some visual cleanup, and add some warmth into our experience to continue to build trust with our user base.

Overall, a huge effort that I couldn't have done without the help of a very talented team. The end result managed to reduce greatly the number of user and system errors our member's received when authenticating, as well as improve the security offerings of our product across the board.