Designing the vision for customer authentication at Nationwide
Introducing two-factor authentication for the UK's largest building society.
Role: Lead UX Designer & Researcher | Team: Myself, 2 UX Designers, 1 UI Designer, 1 Content Designer, 2 x Business Analysts, 1 Product Owner, Development team
Key outcomes
- Explored and defined authentication methods that balanced risk, security, user experience and technical feasibility.
- Engaged and challenged stakeholders through research and workshops to drive user-centred decision making.
- –Created a modular design framework for authentication that provided a clear roadmap for delivery.
Summary
Setting the direction for Nationwide customers authenticate. The aim was to create a seamless, secure and consistent experience when people accessing their accounts to confirming online purchases.
Problem statement
The introduction of the government’s Strong Customer Authentication regulations required Nationwide to review and update how customers accessed their accounts.
Our goal was to define a vision for authentication at Nationwide that balanced enhanced security with customer convenience.
Project Objectives
- Create a seamless and consistent experience to authenticate across channels
- Ensure we are compliant to new PSD2 ‘Strong Customer Authentication’ regulations
- Reduction in fraudulent activities
- Increase app registration and usage
My Process
Stakeholder interviews and competitor review
We started by conducting one-to-one sessions with key stakeholders to deepen our understanding of the work that had already been done to date and ensure we had a better grasp of the PSD2 government regulations.
Alongside this, we reviewed existing research that had been conducted and looked at how others had approached providing 2-factor authentication that managed to strike a good balance between convenience and security.
Design principles
We distilled this initial research into a set of Design Principles that we would use to help guide our thinking and make design decisions as we moved through the project.
As we were considering how authentication could work in a number of different scenarios - the principles were important to ensure cohesion and consistency in the final solutions we ended up creating..
User journey mapping workshops
The aim of the workshops was to discuss and define an approach for the different authentication moments, as a group.
In the workshop, we considered the optimum journeys from a users perspective but also aimed to identify and highlight any questions, risks and issues which we would go on to answer/resolve as we moved through the project.
Wireflows
We took the output from the workshops and started to refine them with some high-level whiteboard sketches, as a team. This was a really useful exercise to work through some questions or concerns raised from the workshop and create consensus.
Reusability was key when developing these wireflows and we were able to define patterns that could work in a number of different scenarios.
Concept designs and user testing
We ran 3 rounds of user testing, focused on understanding how people found the changes we were planning on introducing to their when authenticating with their bank or making payments online.
Some insights from the testing included:
- Using the app to authorise login / online payments was seen as quite a novel concept by but after trying it once found the process quite simple and straightforward
- There were simply too many different numbers for the customer to remember which caused confusion
- Some found the process of having to change channels to authenticate as “confusing” “strange” and “frustrating”
What I learnt and enjoyed
- Conducting stakeholder interviews at the start of the project helped to understand different team’s priorities and meant I was able to tackle them head-on in later workshops and user research.
- It was important to get buy-in from a variety of different departments (particularly security and risk) if the project was to succeed. Involving them in workshops and user research helped them feel invested in the solutions we created and understood why changes were needed as they were exposed to user feedback, first hand.
- Interactive prototypes were a great way for senior stakeholders to properly visualise proposed solutions, whilst also being used to get feedback from users.