Role: UX Research & Design Intern
UX Researcher
•Screener •User Interviews •Synthesis •Affinity Mapping
UX Designer
•Journey maps •Sketches •Wireframes •Prototypes •User testing
Tools
Figma, UserTesting, Jira, Miro
Team
•Product Manager •UX Researcher •Staff Designer •System Designer
What is Secure Share?
Secure Share is a cloud-native file sharing solution offering end-to-end encryption from upload to delivery.
Secure Share is the spearhead of Virtru’s product-led growth strategy with opportunities for bottom-up adoption within Virtru’s client organizations.
Frequent users of Secure Share might be HR representatives who share sensitive data.
Background
Secure Share is currently not as easy to use as Virtru’s other products.
The users most affected by this are those who share sensitive data repetitively on a daily basis.
Problem Statement
We need to understand repetitive workflows within different industries and the user points associated with them
Hypothesis
As I came into this internship, the following hypothesis had been proposed:
For users who have repetitive workflows, using Secure Share templates may reduce overhead and increase ease-of-use.
The team proposed that these templates would be the best way for our users to save time and creating consistency across their repetitive workflows. Offer letters, for example, could be sent by an HR representative using a pre-written template to new employees quickly and consistently.
Secondary Research
I struggled to find secondary research resources pertaining to our problem space, so instead, I found users from within the company who I could interview for insight.
These interviews helped me identify common use-cases for sensitive data sharing.
Here, I found that solving UX research problems is not always linear, requiring one to remain resourceful, and open to collecting wide-ranging research data points.
People (HR)
Customer Success
Sales
Security
Finance
I conducted internal interviews with stakeholders from departments ranging from HR to Sales, identifying common use-cases for sharing sensitive data repetitively.
User Interviews
Conducting additional external user interviews provided valuable insight into unexpected pain points experienced when users repetitively share sensitive data.
“Having to share passwords through phone calls is a huge pain” - HR Respondent
“SharePoint is convenient but provides too many restrictive barriers to make easy to use” - Finance Respondent
“I would love a solution where sharing sensitive data was more streamlined” - Finance Respondent
Surprisingly, rather than frustrations associated with inputting data repetitively as hypothesized, five out of eight users talked about pain points associated with sharing data.
Ideation
The new insights from external interviews led to cross-functional brainstorming sessions to discuss new solutions and product opportunities.
Figjam Ideation Brainstorming Session
I facilitated a cross-functional brainstorming session with an engineering manager, product manager, and team of designers. This yielded a wealth of potential solutions, providing us with a diversity of innovative perspectives from distinct teams involved in solving our users' needs.
Pivoting to New Solution
Prioritizing our newfound pain points caused us to pivot from templates to our new solution: Tags.
Original Hypothesis: Templates
We originally hypothesised that providing templates would be a solution for our proto-persona: users who frequently send and request sensitive data.
Our new solution, Tags, allow users to more easily store, share, and filter their files.
This solves the common challenges and complexities of dealing with permission roadblocks and complications arising when utilizing multiple storage software and communication channels.
Example: This new solution makes it easier for an HR representative to seamlessly share and store her sensitive offer letters by allowing them to add personal or organizational tags.
Defining MVP & Sketching
Partnering with the Product Manager to define the proposed solution led to the emergence of early design concepts, sparking weeks of iterative sketching and valuable feedback sessions.
In a meeting with my design manager and our Product Manager, we outlined that the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) should encompass two essential functionalities: allowing users to both add existing tags and create new tags. In turn, I began sketching out potential solutions, presenting these initial drafts to our UX Director, System Designer, and UX Developer to gather valuable UX and UI insights. Their feedback not only pinpointed areas for enhancing functionality and accessibility, but they also encouraged me to delve deeper and explore additional design concepts.
Consequently, I devoted the following two weeks to exploring new ideas and refining the designs that resonated most with me.
Testing uncovered confusion around how to create new tags.
A medium-fidelity prototype was concept and usability tested with 8 users. Users expressed familiarity with the tagging as a feature and how to add existing tags, but struggled with recognizing how to create a new tag from scratch.
Sketching evolved in function and ease-of-use.
Two weeks of sketching allowed my design to evolve into a more accessible, and harmonious tagging feature compared to early ideations.
Final Product
The final design achieved both new tag creation and filtering, enhancing Secure Share's capabilities for frequent users and expanding the product's commercial opportunities.
I leveraged Virtru’s Material UI design system to finalize the design, effectively solved for incorporating tagging functionality into the product. Users would now be capable of tagging outgoing and requested files, and grouping files in their history. This solution brings users closer to ownership and control over their files, a pain-point uncovered in early research. Functionality can expand to include restricted access control per tag and integrate Secure Share with storage software for automating the sharing of tagged documents and files.
Learnings
Summary
Our brainstorming session was crucial in coming up with innovative solutions. This experience was valuable and allowed the project to shift towards a more user-centric and holistic solution. This demonstrated to me the importance of entering ideation cross-functionally whenever possible.
Metrics
As it stands, the final design is ready for engineering but has not yet been implemented. I believe minimum critical KPIs include tag usage within Secure Share from three different workflows (History, Inbound, and Outbound).
Future Roadmap
As mentioned previously, research can uncover future use cases for tagging including ABAC sharing, automated file sharing integrations with other products, Secure Spaces, History view tag filtering, and organizational tag control.