Initial Investigation
Adoption begins with onboarding
To solve for problem of churn, we looked to understand the user onboarding journey experience - adoption begins with onboarding. We spoke to Mcafee customers who recently onboarded about their journey, as well as non-Mcafee users about their onboarding experience with other digital tools.
Non - Education
The users incorrectly think AV meets all their protection goals, and make assumptions about how it works because we do not tell them
Underutilized
The users add secondary goals along the way as they learn about more features, but their motivation to act is low
Unassisted
We do not set expectations for how they will see protections working or what to expect for ongoing engagement
What were the gaps in the onboarding journey?
01
We were not effectively communicating to create an understanding of our protections and how they work.
02
We don’t help them act on their add-on goals for setting up more protections. These secondary goals are included in how they calculate and observe value
03
We don’t set expectations for how to observe protections working and engage. They fill the gap with their own assumptions
CONCEPTUAL DESIGN | CROSS-PLATFORM
McAfee Onboarding
Translating learnings into guides
North Star
"Intelligently and progressively guide new users to their protection goals, offering simple education and clear measures of progress while supporting users and letting them control the pace as they gradually increase protection and realize more value across the McAfee product landscape."
Principle 1
Deliver a seamless, consistent onboarding
journey and message across form factors.
Principle 2
Understand the user’s primary intent and
guide them to their protection goals.
Principle 3
Build trust by addressing discomfort, speaking
consistently, and delivering on what we promise.
Why do we believe in these ideas?
Principle 4
To minimize effort, ask for information once
(when absolutely necessary) and reuse it wisely.
Principle 5
Take small steps when onboarding users,
showing progress and letting them call the shots.
Drawing Parallels - Narrowing focus and Scope
Usability insights from McAfee’s Web app
Nearly in parallel, a separate usability research effort was underway, focused on McAfee's Web app's Homepage called MPC, which provided another layer of insight to incorporate into our design thinking. This deepened our insights around the gaps experienced during onboarding which helped guide conceptual thinking for what we needed to solve.
We do not help users get started. They struggled to understand the available protections and how McAfee could help them meet their needs.
First impression quickly turns to overwhelm. When they began to explore beyond the initial cards they became overwhelmed.
Poor sign-in experience. There was a significant drop on the sign-in page because of poor design and lack of proper messaging
Narrowing focus and scope
Super high-level thinking
Detect user intent in some way, to understand their primary area of interest, and confirm with the user (Based on entry point? Survey? Or both?)
Educate the user about the range of protections McAfee has to offer, introduction to Score (Protection pie example? CYA?)
Enroll the user in a quick/easy first value/feature setup, based on intent/area of interest. (Easiest/quickest reward? The biggest impact on protection status?)
Emphasize the completed action’s impact on their overall protection status and encourage further engagement (Score update based on completion of first value/feature setup? Offer another feature setup? Just take to the dashboard?)
Land the user on the dashboard with the least effort, greet/congratulate, and encourage
Guide the user on next steps (Coach marks? Priority action cards?)
Concept UX Flow
Here are the chapters in the conceptual onboarding story...
Finally, we were armed with enough information to begin to conceptualize an onboarding strategy. A core team was assembled, with members representing research, content, and UX strategy, working very closely together to visualize a variety of concepts that began to address known problems, while striking to embody the guiding principles established by the broader team.
Incremental wins
Rather than tackle all these problems at once, we grouped them into phases. Each phase could be built independently and deliver value to our users. We focused on user setup and education first because it would have the biggest impact on our users and team.
Designs
Education
Start by clearly communicating how we protect our users. Connect to problems and principles (why did we create this step?).
Detect Intent
Understanding what is important to users to personalize the experience.
Guide
Offer suggestions that align with user’s goals and intent to get them to value quickly.
Test and Learn
Usability Testing
Objectives
We conducted additional user research to gather feedback and measure the proposed solution’s effectiveness in meeting our project goals.
Key Insights
We help customers understand how we protect them, and what they need to do to meet those goals. by communicating through a simplified protection model construct and consistently using it throughout.
They want to set up the baseline for all 3 categories of protections when they can understand simply how it relates to their goals of device, identity, and privacy protection.
They want to be guided in some way and can connect set-up tasks with protection goals more easily when organized under the protection model.
They are looking to us to tell them how to set up protections to meet their goals and what to do first.
Quantitative Summary
Confidence in their understanding of how McAfee protects them started strong and increased through the steps. Uncertainty crept in once they landed on the dashboard (the downward trend at the end of the graph), where the guided setup stopped, noting that the protection model was no longer guiding them.
The ranking for ease of use (Technology acceptance model questionnaire) was higher than that observed from MPC home page testing without onboarding flow.
Method
Moderated user-interview 6 participants from the US, age 30-55
Overview
McAfee offers a range of products for device, web, and mobile security. To keep up with evolving threats, the company has prioritized rapid innovation, but this has led to challenges like inconsistent branding and language, confusing users, especially those with multiple products. The onboarding process highlighted these issues, as customers often dropped off early. Cross-functional teams at McAfee aimed to tackle this by understanding and addressing early churn, streamlining onboarding, and better aligning with user needs.
What is exploratory project model and why did we follow this?
Onboarding has been a topic for some time, across various stakeholder groups for a variety of reasons. Research began at the beginning of the year, and has been increasing in focus across different product teams and stakeholders peaking the interest of the leadership team as well. We wanted to begin by understanding the problem space, using an investigative process, and gradually increasing knowledge over time, through inquiry and observation. Only once we fully understand the problems we’re solving for, can we begin to imagine solutions and ensure we’ve “designing the right thing”.
Continue exploring more work
Stakeholder Alignment
Principles Workshop
With early insights as inputs, we wanted to turn our investigation internally and focus on creating a shared vision and key principles to guide us toward a holistic McAfee onboarding experience.
We quickly collaborated with the cross-functional stakeholders in a workshop, and based on the input received, we synthesized it into a North Star vision and guidelines for creating an optimal onboarding journey.
