Cisco Duo Security
INDUSTRY SPONSORED • PRODUCT DESIGN • UX RESEARCH
Make cybersecurity more accessible and inclusive
PROJECT TYPE
End-to-end product design project for Duo Security
TARGET USER
Duo end users with low vision
OUTCOME
FPO
TEAM
My role: Product design
Collaborating Researcher: Phyllis Fei
Project Manager: Melanie Girod
DURATION
12 weeks (Sep 2022 - Dec 2022)
MY CONTRIBUTION
User Research: Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Affinity Maps, Persona Mapping, Journey Mapping, Empathy Maps
UX Design: Sketches, Wireframing, Usability Testing, High-fidelity prototyping
BACKGROUND
Overview
As a part of one of my core courses at UC Berkeley Haas Business School, ‘Equitable Design Lab’, students were tasked to work with an industry sponsor on a given problem statement and formulate the day-in-the-life design solution.
With my collaborating researcher, we chose to work with Cisco, especially on Duo Security which is two-factor authentication and data protection product — which helps make security resilience easy for your organization, with user-friendly features for secure access, strong authentication, and device monitoring.
My role
As the sole product designer, I worked independently in strategizing, conceptualizing, designing, user testing, and iterating with stakeholder feedback to create a final prototyped solution. My primary responsibilities included defining the product strategy, analyzing user research, wireframing low-fidelity designs to prototyping high-fidelity designs, and collaborating closely with the product manager.
DEFINE
Problem statement
When designing a cybersecurity system, usability and accessibility should be given equal weight. Without doing this, we can run the risk of overlooking the needs of huge segments of the population who have a variety of disabilities. For the user, the complexity of the user authentication method is worsened by the fact that methods that have high security have low usability and vice-versa.
Cisco came to us in hopes to understand how they could make cybersecurity more accessible and inclusive and what are the accessible ways to detect, prevent, alert, or resolve cybersecurity attacks on people with disabilities.
Based on their given challenge, we narrowed down the user group to people with vision impairment and brought up a specific problem statement below.
Alert cyber attacks to people with vision impairment in a faster yet less overwhelming way?
HOW MIGHT WE…
IMPLEMENT
Solution
FPO
DESIGN PROCESS
RESEARCH
Research strategy
We decided to divide our research into two phases — a Secondary research phase where we understood the context of the problem, conducted initial stakeholder interviews and investigated existing solutions.
This was followed by a Primary research phase where we focused on three interview criteria — people with disabilities, people in accessibility and disability research, and experts in cybersecurity.
We conducted 11 in-depth user interviews and then synthesized all of this data into an affinity map that helped me build personas, empathy maps, journey maps, and design ideas.
We identified our stakeholders, conducted formative interviews, mapped out the user pain points, and took a look at some of the important technology-based solutions currently present in their day-to-day lives.
Analysis
We synthesized the collected data from the interviews and competitive analysis into an affinity map to help form insights and brainstorm design ideas to solve user’s higher-order problems.
Key insights
Based on the affinity map, we found that people with low vision are capable of using many digital devices and assistive technologies. They are even more skillful to adapt to these technologies.
However, they set up different sounds and/or vibrations to different applications, to identify which application the notification comes from. They are required to pay attention to all different sounds and/or vibrations — and this is overwhelming for them and the people around them, especially when different types of notifications all come at the same time.
It takes a lot of energy in daily life by paying attention to alerts from all those devices or technologies. Technologies are helping disabled people a lot but also interrupting in different ways with alerts. They continue to process sounds and/or vibrations even more than people without disabilities.
Among the collected data, we generated the following key insights that I want to highly emphasize on.
User persona & Empathy map
Based on my insight and observation from the research methods, I created a user persona that captured the essence of our users and their characteristics. I also formed empathy maps to understand their needs and frustrations.
Task analysis & Journey map
The persona and empathy map helped us outline a hierarchical task analysis, which we then used to make a journey map highlighting the pain points and the opportunities for improvement.
Brainstorm ideas
IDEATE
Redefine User flow
FPO. We tackled the original design prototypes by starting from reviewing its information architecture and pin-pointing the risks and errors in the user flows. Because finances are drivers' top priorities, the updated flow prevents the app from selecting the rental before it is available to avoid incorrect charges. We mainly focused on the following part:
Conceptualization & Sketching
Low-fidelity prototype
DESIGN & PROTOTYPE
Our main goal was no audio feedback, easy-to-use but highly secure, and tactile methods for alerting cyberattacks. FPO. With the improved user flows and research insights, I created low-fidelity prototypes to improve the overall experience based on the previous refined user flows and research insights. The Low fidelity prototypes helped us take the sketches to a next level but a step before the high-fidelity mockups. Simple prototypes were of great use in identifying components for framing the design system and also to get initial feedback from the team before we stepped into concentrating on the visual design which required a mammoth effort.
User testing
EVALUATE
FPO We conducted expert evaluation and peer review sessions to evaluate our three designs. A set of standard questions were asked to evaluate interest in the designs. We ended up choosing the design with the highest scores – Service Center.
we conducted user testing to understand how users would interact with our prototype and their adjacent experience in student information platforms. The team was also able to understand whether the ideas presented were engaging and identify what needed to be improved.
Tasks:
1.
2.
3.
Evaluation method
Expert evaluation
10 Experts
Senior technicians
Stakeholders
Peer review
10 HCI Master’s students
Findings
1.
2.
3.
Refine & Iterate design
DESIGN & PROTOTYPE
FPO. Feedback. before and after
Evaluate usability & accessibility
EVALUATE
data. numbers
Takeaways
REFLECTION
FPO
Next steps
FPO