Telling people when their passwords have been stolen

Breaches were in the news, and the app needed a reason to be opened.

We needed to increase engagement with the app and gain more users. With password and data breaches making headlines, we thought a tool that let people check whether their passwords had ever been stolen would raise engagement and increase the number of passwords each person added. Our KPI was to move saved login records per user from 5 to 10.

People wanted it, but did not trust that it could be simple.

In testing, people loved the idea of checking whether their login records had been stolen, but did not believe it was that easy to do. Separately, we were negotiating a contract with another company to run the stolen password check. That negotiation was blocking development of the feature, so we went another route.

Flows and prototypes from user stories, tested at every step.

I created user flows and prototypes from user stories, and ran usability and preference testing throughout the design process to check my decisions. Engineering had known limitations, so I shared the designs with the team as they developed to keep us aligned.

Android gave us root-level access to the phone, which iOS did not.

That let the Android app do more than the iOS one. It could work across other apps on the device, so the design covered more than the password check itself: the stolen and safe results, locking individual apps, and filling in logins inside other apps.

The project is no longer live in the App Store or Google Play. I do not have data showing whether we met the KPI of 10 saved logins per user, so I am not claiming a result here.

I also spent time structuring the files and using symbols in Sketch so the app could be re-skinned quickly if one of our carriers wanted to move forward with the project.