LOGIN & REGISTRATION REDESIGN
on behalf of MetLife
THE CHALLENGE
MetLife, one of America’s top sellers of Insurance and Financial Products, decided to bring self-service for their group and retail lines of business together behind a single login and registration system. This was complicated by customer information being completely segregated in backend systems with differing identity authentication methods and supporting processes. As a government contractor in highly regulated industries security considerations constrained design choices, as did dependencies on some antiquated backend systems.
THE DESIGN OBJECTIVE
Devise a seamless experience, allowing MetLife’s millions of customers to use a single set of credentials to view all their holdings, hiding the backend complexity throughout credential creation, authentication and password recovery.
Final design of the redesigned registration.
Wireframes of various registration and login screens, created in Axure.
Hybrid user flow diagrams showing various paths the customer might take through registering, verifying their identity and associating their product holdings.
PROJECT DETAILS
Platform: Responsively designed web application.
DESIGN PROCESS
Audience Analysis
Audience analysis yielded a breakdown of the 17+M customers, customer service professionals, and financial advisors/brokers of very mixed computer proficiency.
Because group and retail customer data were held in separate systems, we forced to tell us why they’d come —at registration and again at each login. We learned that much of our call volume came from customers selecting the wrong system.
Anonymized replay of customer sessions allowed me to watch people struggle, revealing weak calls-to-action and recovery flows requiring policy information not likely to be in-hand. This tracked with customer feedback and site metrics, providing confidence that we knew what was driving abandonment and call volume.
Setting Experience Objectives
Looking at the business goals again through the lens of the gathered user data and obvious obstacles, the team devised six experience objectives for the project:
Create a single unified registration experience for all site visitors, regardless of line of business or self-servicing needs.
Use what we know about a customer’s policy holdings to make linking policies to their profile simpler.
Facilitate mobile registration by minimizing policy documentation required for success.
Create a simplified self-service credential recovery system to reduce call volume, thereby reducing costs.
Increase acceptance of electronic consent agreement, allowing electronic delivery of policy documents, reducing servicing costs.
Achieve a Section 508/W3C accessibility rating of AA, ensuring all customers and employees could use our website, disabled or not.
Information Architecture
In order to achieve the six experience objectives, login, registration and support flows would have to be completely rethought. This meant partnering closely with a number of application development groups and having data services built to support brand new experiences.
To communicate the proposed flows to stakeholders I developed 20 sets of detailed flow diagrams which traced each type of system user through the proposed new experience.
Wireframing
I created a full set of interactive wireframes in multiple desktop and mobile aspect ratios, fleshing out the interactions implied by my diagrams. Axure enabled me to simulate rich interactions, allowing the wireframes to be used as a communication tool and as a prototype for purposes of usability testing.
Usability Testing
We used Chalkmark and Axure as well as professional
Visual Design & Copy
It was important that the visual design and copy be as straightforward as possible, with helpful imagery to assist customers in locating identity-verifying policy information where necessary.
I worked with the visual designer to simplify the existing platform style guide, minimizing extraneous screen elements while also providing clear user feedback and indicators of progress. It was essential that emphasis be placed firmly on supporting the customer in completing the task.
WHAT I LEARNED
Positively identifying customer identity is a challenge, and being assured two records belong to the same individual even more so. Go as far as you are certain you can, but it’s okay to ask for verification when necessary. People would rather be challenged for verification than have you confuse their financial records with someone else’s.
That said, use everything you know to get as far as you can before you ask anything. Redundant questions undermine customer trust
Make sure you design for your support personnel, too. As you define your new workflows, make sure they have access to the screens that are vital for them helping the customer.
OUTCOMES
Registrations up 11% year-over-year
97% success rate for policy association during registration
98% of customers agree to eConsent, allowing a shift them to paperless delivery of policy documents at great cost savings.
87% self-service password reset rate (formerly 7%)
Mobile Web Logins increased 65%
A mobile view of the identity verification step of the redesigned registration.
Design inputs including, site analytics, user heat maps, datamining customer feedback and heuristic analysis of the existing site.