"Manage your online presence, one footprint at a time."
ABOUT
Advancements in technology have allowed us to share and gather information at lightning speeds. At the click of a button, we can send well wishes or family photos to friends and family across the world, speak to our doctors from the comfort of our own homes, and even watch live events. However, the information you share online can often leave you vulnerable.
What if you can minimize some of the risks that comes with being online? This is what we wanted to learn when creating CyberShield.
Research
conducted via online survey and interviews
Primary Device
iPhone
Most Used App Category
Social Media
Biggest Concerns with Personal Data
Lack of Control
The Conversation
Question
How can companies help you manage your data security?
Be more transparent by telling us what information they’re using and how they’re using it.
Provide people with a clear way to access data privacy settings.
Provide more tools for people to control their information.
The Takeaway
01
People feel like they aren't in control over their data
02
Tools that help people manage their data are not readily accessible
03
There needs to be transparency in how personal information is being used
The Problem
A majority of internet users feel unprotected while using online services, and have difficulty controlling how their data is collected, stored, and used. How can we present a solution that enables users to take control of their digital footprint?
Ideation
Driven by user feedback, we envisioned a tool that would allow people to manage their personal data in one centralized application.
Feature Design
The insights we gained from our user research provided us, we knew we had to implement a design that allows users to have visibility and manageability over the personal information they share with companies. In addition, we understood that users have a plethora of online accounts to manage, which makes it even more difficult to gain the control they were lacking. With these points in mind, we came up with three main features for CyberShield:
Home Dashboard
Serves as the default landing page when opening CyberShield. Provides a quick overview of key security items, such as: phone update status, browser data, recent breaches, and information regarding connected accounts.
My Footprint
The main feature of CyberShield. My Footprint allows users to review their online accounts for their stored data, such as: contact information, location, and activity. Users are also able to manage online posts and request account deactivation through My Footprint.
Privacy Manager
Allows users to toggle several privacy settings. Users can enable private browsing on their device, have CyberShield perform a weekly scan for their data across the internet, and set notifications for inactive accounts.
Prototyping
Low Fidelity Prototype
After research and ideation, our next step was to build out a low-fidelity prototype to translate our insights into a tangible solution while still giving us the opportunity to improve upon the designs after receiving feedback from user testing. The first iteration of the low-fidelity prototype is shown below.
User Testing
We went through multiple rounds of user testing after each iteration in our design. During each user testing session, we asked the users to do various tasks within the app and asked additional follow up questions. We documented their responses and were given actionable items to improve upon for our subsequent iterations.
Low Fidelity to High Fidelity Iterations
The feedback we received during our low-fidelity testing was used when translating the design to a high fidelity prototype. The overall feature design was still in place, but there were some updates made to improve usability concerns highlighted in our user testing.
Changes
Removed 'Settings' menu and relocated to the Home tab.
Users felt it wasn't intuitive in the original location and would have expected to see it in the Home tab.
Added a helper documentation link to the 'Private Browsing' toggle.
Some users didn't understand the details of the feature and felt they would want to read more about it.
Modified order of the navigation bar.
Users felt like they would be spending the majority of their time in My Footprint rather than Privacy Manager so it would make more sense to have it next to Home.
High Fidelity Iterations
Once we translated our design to a high fidelity prototype, we wanted to do another round of user testing. Our main goal was to iron out any additional usability concerns that might have been missed when testing on our low fidelity prototype. After receiving feedback from our high fidelity user testing, we were able to improve on our design some more.
Changes
Added Filters to Archives when viewing through selected app.
The original design showed all Archives when accessing the Archives directly from an app. This was different than what users expected to see when accessing Archives in this manner and was counterintuitive.
Final Product
Here is our final design. We made a few tweaks after the last iteration to clean things up a bit, but kept the overall functionality the same. We were excited to deliver this design as the final product, because we were able to see how much it improved after each iteration and how user feedback affected the direction of our design.
Retrospective
I had so much fun designing this app with my team. I especially enjoyed how enthusiastic everyone was to deliver a design that resonated with our users. It truly felt like we put our collective hearts into it. I also learned a lot about what it takes to be part of a design team throughout the course of this project. I was out of my comfort zone when it came to certain UI styling decisions, but I felt reassured because we discussed them as a team. This allowed me to grow as a designer, because I learned how to collaborate better.
If I could go back and do one thing over, I would have implemented a design system prior to building out the high fidelity prototypes. When going through our iterations, we spent a lot of time making adjustments to different elements because we wanted to make sure the design was consistent throughout each screen. If we had a design system in place, we would have saved a lot of time and effort. I appreciate the lessons I've learned and will definitely be applying them to improve on my future design work.