How pivoting a research-driven design project improved file sharing capabilities for frequent users while uncovering future commercial opportunities.
Role UX Research and UX Design Intern
• Responsible for collaborating with PM, UXR, and Staff Designer to establish problem scope.
• Exploratory research to find pain points and present findings to cross-functional teams.
• Facilitate ideation sessions, and designing prototypes. Conducting usability tests of MVP designs with users.
Team
Product Manager, UX Researcher, Staff Designer, System Designer
What is Secure Share?
Secure Share is Virtru’s recently launched encryption-based file sharing and messaging platform. As a secure alternative to sharing and requesting large files using email, Secure Share is the spearhead of a product-led growth strategy which couples its intuitive self-source onboarding capabilities with opportunities for bottom-up adoption within Virtru’s client organizations.
The Problem
Secure Share is currently not as easy to use as some of Virtru’s other products. As a secure file-sharing platform, the users most affected by this are those who share sensitive data on a daily basis. In order to improve Secure Share for these frequent users, we needed to understand repetitive workflows within different industries and the user pain points associated with them.
Hypothesis Discovery
As I came into this internship, the following hypothesis had been proposed, and was the starting point for the project.
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.
Internal stakeholder interviews allowed us to gather data early into exploratory 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. I conducted internal interviews with stakeholders from departments ranging from HR to Sales, identifying common use-cases for sharing sensitive data repetitively. 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.
From the departments interviewed, I found that the People (HR) and Accounting & Finance exhibited the most common use-cases for sharing sensitive data repetitively in their workflows.
External interviews provided valuable insight into users’ tools, workflows, and pain points.
I interviewed eight external employees from HR, Finance, and Accounting departments to find out more about how they tackle repetitive tasks handling sensitive data. Knowing I would be presenting the findings to my UX team, PM, and the VP of our department, I designed various artifacts for presenting the synthesized interview findings. Finally, I settled on a journey map as a way to summarize the workflow for the users I interviewed, highlighting their three main pain points.
Surprisingly, rather than frustrations associated with inputting data repetitively as hypothesized, five out of eight users talked about pain points associated with sharing data. Cloud software used by these employees oftentimes restricted sharing of the data, depending on who had access. This proved a more difficult hurdle to overcome than the repetitive nature of requesting the data, shedding a new light on our research problem.
New insights from external interviews led us to seek outside perspectives.
To address the new challenges presented by our users’ unexpected pain-points, I facilitated a cross-functional ideation brainstorming session with an engineering manager, our product manager, and our team of designers. The brainstorming session yielded a wealth of potential solutions, providing us with a diversity of innovative perspectives from distinct teams involved in solving our users' needs.
Figjam Ideation Brainstorming Session
Redefining the solution for our proto-persona led us to pivot from templates to tags.
We originally hypothesised that providing templates would be a solution for our proto-persona: users who frequently send and request sensitive data. However, after conducting ideation brainstorming sessions with cross-functional teams, our product manager determined that tags would be a more compelling solution to the larger problem of file organization and management.
Tags would allow users to more easily store, share, and filter their files, which would address the pain points of our proto-persona uncovered during research.
This new solution makes it easier for an HR representative to share and store her sensitive offer letters by allowing her to add personal or organizational tags. This helps to avoid the common challenges and complexities of dealing with permission roadblocks and complications across multiple storage software and communication channels.
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 ones. 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.
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, and so I would be interested to see how Virtru would measure its success if it is rolled-out. 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.