Around one million customers log on to Legal & General’s My Account where they manage their pensions, investments, and life insurance products every month.
The business goal is to enhance login security by offering Multi-Factor Authentication which sends a One-Time Passcode (verification code) either via email or SMS of the user’s choice.
Ensuring true end-to-end service by providing customer help guidance including the Service Error Codes for Help Chatbot, Live Chat, and Customer Support Call Centre.
Gradual release to the selected business segments in early September 2023 so that we don't overwhelm Customer Support.
Release completed by the end of September 2023 to L&G's 10 million customers without any major incidents.
My Role
Working as a Lead UX designer who is responsible for the end-to-end My Account registration and login journey by applying the Design Thinking process (Kick-off, Discovery, Define, Design, Test, and Iterate to Launch)
Overseeing user testing, which I delegated to a contract UX designer.
Working in Agile teams which consisted of Product owners, Business Analysts, Solution Architect, Scrum Master, Frontend Developers, Backend Developers, QA Testers and UX Designers
Challenge
While investment customers log on to My Account quite frequently, Pension customers (80% of total My Account login users) only log on once in a while. Therefore, most of them don’t remember their User ID and/or password.
Worked with the old customer database, which didn’t obtain the customer’s mobile number during their product purchase stage, so those customers could not receive a verification code via SMS.
Solution
Enable customers to log in with their email address which is by far easier to recall than User ID.
Customers have the option of receiving the verification code via email or SMS. If the customer’s mobile number was not registered in our database, they skip choosing the verification option and enter the code received by email.
To ensure caring for vulnerable customers, offered true end-to-end service by providing customer help guidance including the Service Error Codes for Help Chatbot, Live Chat, and Customer Support Call Centre.
Kick-off
Met with the product owner and was informed that her business goal was to enhance login security by offering Multi-Factor Authentication which sends a One-Time Passcode via email or SMS of the user’s choice. Currently, the code is sent to email only.
The brief scope was not to deviate from the current login journey but to improve where we identify the critical problem.
The backend had the huge task of migrating the registered consumer database to the new one.
Managing consumer registration and access needs to be considered as part of the Security Access Management Application.
Our success metric was set to reduce the volume of calls related to the login journey to the call centre.
Discovery & Define
Problem 1. Log in with either User ID or email address
Gathered My Account analysis and discovered that 80% of total My Account login users are Pension customers who only log in occasionally. Therefore, most of them don’t remember their User ID and/or password.
The customers could only log in with their email address if it were set as their User ID in the existing login design.
Assumption: I find it easier to log in with my email address instead of User ID as it is easy to recall my email address.
Problem 2. Unclear ‘Forgot User ID’ and ‘Forgot Password’ path
Conducted the Heuristic Review of the current journey and discovered that it was unclear which path the user needed to take when they ‘Forgot User ID’ or ‘Forgot Password’ due to unclear merged labelling of ‘Forgot login details’.
Assumption: I want to see clear labels when I forgot my User ID or password so that I can resolve the issue easily and quickly without getting lost.
Problem 3. I don’t have a mobile to receive a code via SMS
Discussed with the Backend developers and discovered that offering a verification code by SMS would face a problem due to the old form the agents dealt with which didn’t obtain the customer’s mobile number during their product purchase stage.
Assumption: As I don’t have a mobile phone, I don’t want to be offered an SMS verification option so that I can avoid errors occurring.
Problem 4. Reduce the volume of calls to the Call centre but offer efficient customer service
We were set the goal of reducing the volume of calls related to login to the Call Centre without compromising the quality of customer service.
Assumption: As a business owner, I want to reduce the volume of calls to the Call Centre when the error occurs during the login journey so that I can keep the cost down but I want to maintain a high quality of customer service and efficiency by offering Help Chat with the service error codes.
Design, Test & Iterate
1. Log in with either email address or User ID
Design: Offered the option of logging in with either email address or User ID.
Test: Conducted usability testing to validate that the participants understood they could log in with either email address or User ID.
Result and resolution:
Participants clearly understood they could log in with either email address or User ID.
Although email address is easy to remember, we kept the use of User ID as it can be more secure (harder to guess).
The 'Enter email address or User ID' page continued to be separated from the 'Enter password' page to prevent from brute force attacks.
2. Unclear ‘Forgot User ID’ and ‘Forgot Password’ path
Design: Offered clear labelling and separated ‘Forgot User ID’ and ‘Forgot password’ journey.
Test: Conducted the existing design vs the new design A/B testing to find out which performs better. Also tested what their next step would be once they were informed of their email address and User ID.
Result and resolution:
The success rate of the new design was by far greater than the existing design
Participants preferred to log in once they were informed of their email address and User ID instead of resetting their password which was the existing design.
3. I don’t have a mobile to receive a code via SMS
Design: Customers have the option of receiving the verification code by either email or SMS. If we don’t hold customers' mobile numbers in our database, they skip choosing the option and enter the code that they receive by email.
Test: Conducted the Usability Test and Think-Out-Loud test
Result and resolution: Participants had no issue skipping the choosing verification options.
4. Reduce the volume of calls to the Call Centre but offer efficient customer service
Design: Offered the error service codes for efficient Help Chat.
Test: Conducted the Usability Test and Think-Out-Loud test to validate if the error messages were clear and easily understood.
Result and resolution:
Participants understood most of the error messages clearly and knew what to do next to resolve the issue by following the instructions in the message.
Learnt to balance the error content to be friendly, short enough, and yet descriptive within the brand’s tone of voice guideline.
Ran another A/B testing with the iterated versions to ensure iterated designs were effective.
