Rethinking online registration
Our goal was simple.
How might we improve the online registration experience for our 'deemed' members to make it easier for them to get secure access to their account information online?
Overview
AustralianSuper is the largest superannuation fund in Australia, with over 2.2 million members. Most become members of the fund in one of two ways, they either join the fund directly or they are ‘deemed’, meaning their employers create an account on their behalf.
The challenge is that just because you’re a member of the fund doesn’t necessarily mean you have online access to your account. For members who join directly online, creating an account and registering for online access are part of a single process. On the other hand, members who are deemed need to register for online access separately.
After speaking with members who have gone through online registration, we identified several pain points that needed to be addressed.
We decided to focus on three areas of improvement:
How might we mitigate the risk of account verification emails being sent to spam folders?
How might we improve account security and help members create more secure passwords?
How might we guide our members through online registration to make it simpler and faster?
Working with stakeholders across the fund, I led the design initiative to address these three areas of improvement, with the goal of delivering a next generation online registration experience that makes it easier for our members to get secure access to their account information online.
Over the course of several months, I ran numerous discovery and ideation workshops to narrow down a design direction, worked with internal and external teams to determine technical and business feasibility and communicated the new end-to-end experience to internal teams through showcases.
Working with our delivery partners, the new online registration experience was delivered on 7 November 2019.
Mitigating the risk of account verification emails being sent to spam folders
Part of the current online registration experience is to verify your email address by clicking on a secure link that is send to your email. When a member clicks on this link, they will be taken to a new tab on their browser where they’ll be able to complete the online registration process. A challenge we identified after speaking with many of our members is that this link can often end up in their spam folder. We wanted to fix this problem.
Working with our security and architecture teams, we proposed a brand new experience utilising two-factor authentication (2FA). This new experience brings the following benefits:
The verification code that is emailed is plain text instead of a link, meaning the email would less likely end up in a spam folder
2FA is more commonly used and feels more familiar and secure to members
Because the member doesn’t need to click a link that opens a new tab, they would only have a single tab to focus on
Improving account security and helping members create more secure passwords
A seperate initiative that has taken place at AustralianSuper is to review the security and risk of our existing password policy. The decision was made to change our password policy and move to a 13 character password minimum with a restriction on specific key words.
Understanding that setting a secure password can be difficult, we felt that this was an opportunity to take our first steps in implementing the new password policy along with appropriate guidance and support.
Guiding our members through online registration to make it simpler and faster
The current online registration form is starting to show its age. Besides the visual design, the form does not provide the level of guidance and support a member would need to feel confident in completing the process.
We wanted to address this with a visual uplift that focused on guiding our member through online registration. Screens would be broken down and grouped together where relevant and context was provided at each step along the way to make it easier for members to know exactly what information they needed to provide.
Usability testing with members
In July 2019, our UX researcher ran two full days of usability testing with members comparing the current online registration experience against our proposed experience.
The goal of the usability testing was to:
Identify the barriers and pain points members experience when using the current and proposed online registration process to gain online access to their account.
Identify if the proposed prototype of the online registration process resolves the issues we find in the current registration process.
Use the insights from the usability test to inform the design of upcoming projects
The research confirmed that the new registration process would provide a better experience for members, with some additional adjustments identified which would further improve the experience.
The final designs
This is the final prototype that was used to develop the new experience.
You can see the new online registration experience here.