Designing login and registration flow
My Role: UX design, prototyping, usability testing, and UX writing
I guided the UX decision-making and made mockups as-needed to guide development and testing.
What was the business problem?
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) knew they were experiencing a loss of potential revenue by not having control over who accessed their research data
Commercial for-profit companies were using personal email addresses to download their datasets for free and then repacking them for profit.
IHME also wanted to know why people were downloading their data. They didn’t have a grasp on the nuances of their core users yet.
Who was on the team?
I collaborated with several teams to be successful.
Client Services: Main stakeholder and collaborator, owned relationship with commercial clients who licensed data.
Developers: I worked with two development teams. One team was a vendor team working in Europe and the other was a US based team. We were all working remotely.
Product manager: This person filled in many functions - determining product releases and features, research assistant, and project management.
How were research datasets being downloaded before the solution?
Reviewing analytics, we determined that users were navigating through our main site or bookmarking tools directly.
High level flow to find data, manipulate it, then download
Hypothesis
We believe we can reduce unauthorized use of data by directing users to create accounts and authenticate before downloading.
The login and registration solution was determined by leadership ahead of time. It was my job to guide the user experience and put processes in place for usability testing.
I facilitated a workshop with stakeholders and team members to agree on a hypothesis for usability testing and overall project success.
Design Process
I structured the project using Design Thinking phases
Evaluating the existing experience
IHME has a global audience of policymakers, healthcare professionals, and expert academics. I brought up some questions to ask during usability testing.
Was the language easy to understand and / or translatable across countries?
Was the order of information confusing and causing any trouble completing?
Would the new registration flow provide new barriers to data access that would be insurmountable?
Collaborating with development partners: mobile first
I created wireframes to explore where in the current tool called GBD Results the account information would link from, and at what point users should be required to login. After collaborating with the product manager and visualization tool development lead, we agreed users should be able to explore the data before being required to register.
Registration flow mockups
Using an existing design system and style guidelines, I designed a one page form. It is one page, and not 3 separate steps, because I read UX research that showed people prefer to scroll and complete information at once rather than needing to click through multiple pages.
I used mobile form design best practices, wrote the copy, and error messages.
There are three steps:
Enter email
Retrieve code from an email account and confirm
Create account
User enters email in the first step of the form
Usability testing
I planned and facilitated a global usability test with help from a product manager.
We recruited people from a list of email addresses that had previously downloaded data. We didn’t know that much about them so we tried to find a variety of emails to cover: government, education, and private sector.
I took turns facilitating 1 hour semi-structured interviews with my research partner.
We asked participants to complete 3 core tasks: register, login, and reset password. We also asked questions about their data needs as well as gathered some high level feedback about the tool the new account system was connected to by asking them to show us how they might look for data they need in their role.
Content usability updates
One of several outcomes of the usability testing was there was some friction in the reset password flow. We decided to test an existing flow the vendor had implemented before so I didn’t make any modifications to it.
It was very quick for participants to complete, but there were moments of confusion that we were able to easily fix.
Wording on the buttons didn’t fit the context. After a participant verified their email address, the button copy said “Continue to sign up” but in actuality they were about to select a new password. I changed it to “Choose a new password.”
I also recommended they add the password requirements to the screen where they reset the password. Users don’t remember previous requirements.
Outcomes
I revised the mockups based on the usability testing, and annotated screenshots to update language on ”reset password.”
The vendor implemented what we considered the “MVP,” which had most of the requested changes.
Today, there are over 75,000 accounts.
This is an active stream for revenue leads generating over hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I also gathered feedback about the GBD Results tool itself after participants logged in. Most of those changes needed to wait for additional funding to enact.
