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Leading and facilitating the design process with the cross-functional team
1 product designer (me)
1 content designer
1 ux researcher
1 product manager
1 engineering manager
8 developers
Miro
Figma
Confluence
2023 Q3 - 2024 Q1
Executive summary
In 2023 Q3 I lead the design process at LastPass to help IT admins spread security in their organization. This resulted in consuming more licenses and increasing LastPass’s penetration rate (licenses consumed/company size) among all customers overall by 2%. I can’t share exact details, but while it seems like a small number, it actually was a lot of $$$.
The starting point
LastPass recognized a multi-million dollar revenue increase opportunity: Sell more licenses to current B2B customers, aka increase the penetration rate. (If a company has 100 employees and bought 10 LastPass licenses, then LastPass's penetration rate is 10%)
IT admins want to increase the security posture of their organization through high LastPass utilization.
There's a natural link
If users see and understand the value of LastPass they will roll it out in their organization
If we help them get users actually use LastPass, they will want to buy more licenses
LastPass's penetration rate is increased
Can I fight solution bias?
The team was already biased towards a solution: Let's make it a dashboard. I thought: Is there anything else we could do?
So I organized a series of ideation workshops for the team to generate a ton of other options.
While we explored other options and assessed them on an impact/effort matrix, we agreed: Let's completely rework our dashboards first, to enable IT admins to boost LastPass adoption in their organization. Regardless of the end result, we collected a lot of great improvement ideas for future projects.
Co-ncepting
I started to work out the concepts based on the priorizied list of ideas. The main concept was to show actionable insights that IT admins can actually utilize (by sending customizable email reminders) to get more employees to use LastPass. When I found a good direction I invited my content design and researcher partners to some co-design sessions, where we refined the concepts and came up with a plan on how to test them.
The 1st concept... failed
Test participants missed of overall clarity. They just didn't get the concept.
Priority of metrics wasn't displayed well. Too many CTAs overwhelmed users.
The use case was misunderstood. They thought it's about platform onboarding.
The 2nd concept... succeeded
They got the whole concept now. The purpose of the screen was clear.
They appreciated the structure, liked the new collapsable sections.
They appreciated the de-prioritization of opportunities that can only possible boost scores.
They understood the data visualization, they didn't need further explanation.
Identified some improvement areas for future iterations
Some scope cutting adjusting
Due to some priority and resource changes we had to adjust our plans to ship value in a more incremental way. I proposed a phased approach with a first version that still solves the root problem.
No customizable email option
No email preview
Don't introduce page hierarchy
Keep "opportunities to improve..." more generic
Fewer options to dig deep in data, only include rich data in exports
Finalize it with LastKit 2.0
We got the validated concept, what was left is to finalize the UI and apply LastPass's new design system: LastKit 2.0. Along the way we had to make some compromises. Our end goal was to have one dashboard that displays all important information, but to deliver value quicker, we kept the structure of the current dashboards and introduced a simple overview page. This guides users to the information they care about the most in the meantime.
Interim overview page to direct users to the section that's most relevant, depending where they are in the lifecycle.
Adoption dashboard shows actionable insights on where users are stuck and whether they are using LastPass or not.
Security dashboard shows actionable insights on vulnerable credentials stored in LastPass, and much more.
Outcome: Yay, more money
This project heavily contributed to LastPass's main business goal for 2023 H2: To sell more licenses to current customers (aka improve penetration rate). Thanks to the revamped dashboards, IT admins were now enabled to drive LastPass utilization in their organizations, resulting in them buying more licenses thus improving LastPass's penetration rate overall among current customers by 2% (that was a lot of $$$).
Challenges and takeaways
Navigating between business expectations and user needs wasn't easy, but with an open and positive-minded team we managed to align on a phased approach that provides value even in the first small release.
When a solution idea is already lingering in the team it still makes sense to explore other ideas. Even if it doesn't change the direction, it can be useful exploration for the future. We had a great time ideating and the team was reassured that the initial idea is the right one to persue first.