The Dark Web journey

Desktop experience

The following designs were created by the original Dark Web Monitoring team, prior to being handed over to my team to take forward. I’ve included them purely to set context as to how the feature began, as well as to help illustrate how I helped Dark Web Monitoring evolve into what it is today.

User research

Prior to jumping into designs, I referred to recent user research that was completed on the desktop experience specifically. Some of the improvements areas were:

• The + button wasn’t intuitive enough and placed too low

• Users wanted more details/context about the breach itself

• It wasn’t clear whether McAfee was always monitoring

• Language was alarming for users

These main findings helped me form key design principles to keep in mind going forward with the evolution of the Dark Web Monitoring designs.

Design Principles

Final designs

As shown below, we adapted the design in a number of ways:

• “Active” indicator with “last scan” info to provide reassurance to users that we are always monitoring their saved personal info

• Altered content to say “We found your info in x breaches” rather than the previous alarming “Your info is on the dark web” language

• Switched to a horizontal nav treatment to fit more content in the main UI, and also give the “monitored info” its own space rather than relying on the left nav to show all that info

  • Moved “Add more info to monitor” button to the top right nav as a result, which made it more visible for users

Outcome

This project ultimately made identity protection more accessible to McAfee’s users, no matter the device. The first iteration of Dark Web Monitoring existed purely in the desktop world, with only emails supported for monitoring. We expanded the supported personal assets from just one type to 12 types (phone number, SSN/SIN, bank account and more).

Not only did my team deliver a Dark Web Monitoring web experience, but we also created McAfee’s first web app (McAfee Protection Center) with integrated features from scratch. Dark Web Monitoring was the first, but we introduced many more over the months and years to come, turning it into a web-based product suite.

Challenges:

• Engineering constraints

• Shifting priorities

Successes:

• Delivered designs that support up to 11 additional personal info assets in the span of 2 months

• Created a mobile responsive solution

• Validated initial designs and acted upon results quickly

Future improvements

The image shown above is the end-to-end initiative that I lead and piloted as a product-wide process. There were many pieces of each product’s journey that a number of McAfee teams executed on, and it was often hard to get a picture of the entire E2E experience. This initiative consisted of:

• Documenting the E2E journey (which consisted of involving other teams to add screens/info if necessary)

• Documenting which higher level team owned each stage of the journey (i.e., Marketing, eCommerce, Authentication and more)

• Document which Product Manager specifically owned each stage of the journey (i.e., where did the business requirements come from?)

After documenting the E2E flow and adding the context above, I arranged multiple E2E flow review meetings where each relevant stakeholder joined to represent the parts of the experience they own. We spent the time giving each team context, reasoning and constraints for decisions made, and documented process and/or experience gaps in the process. This ultimately lead to alignment/prioritization of the key improvements we could make to the feature in 2024.