Piivately

Creating stewards of personal data.

Client: Piivately is a cybersecurity company that allows small mid-size c companies and startups to protect their customers’ personal identifying information (PII).

Role: UX Designer

Methods: Stakeholder Meeting, User Interviews, Contextual Inquiry, Low-Fidelity Wireframes, Design System, Interactive High-Fidelity Prototype (Desktop), Annotated Wireframes, Findings & Recommendations Report, Presentation.

Tools: Figma, Figjam, Zoom.

Teammates: Kendall Van Horne, Missy Holmes, Amiee Lee.

The Problem

There is no codified set of best practices when it comes to protecting customers’ personal data, and there is no service that provides this protection to businesses. When it comes to small-mid size c companies and startups, protecting customer data is key to protecting their reputation.

Data breaches are costly monetarily, time-wise, and destroy reputations. Piivately wants to address this issue, but needs an informative website to communicate to their user base who they are, what they do, and how they do it. Most of their customers don’t understand the ins and outs of cybersecurity, so they have to convey this information in a way that their users can understand.

How can we create an externally facing, informative website for Piivately that effectively conveys trust and security to users, and includes a variety of media types, including graphics, video and text?

The Stakeholder Interview

To begin, my teammates and I needed to familiarize ourselves with cybersecurity, and better understand the goals of our stakeholders, Andrew and John Dahlberg. We were lucky enough to meet with them on a zoom call to discuss their project goals, learn about their product, and define their user group.

User Interviews

After defining our stakeholder’s goals, we moved on to user interviews. My teammates, Missy and Kendall, headed research and moderated both initial user interviews and usability testing later on. Three of Piivately’s potential users participated and helped us understand what users wanted and expected to see from their site. We collectively documented key findings from these interviews and used affinity mapping to find patterns in their wants and expectations.

Project Goal

With our stakeholder goals and user interview results in mind, we created a goal statement for our project:

When executives at start-ups and small businesses visit Piivately’s website they want to quickly find key information and feel the software is trustworthy and secure so that they can make an informed decision about what cybersecurity software to purchase.

Design System

With a clear project goal in mind, it was time to design! To streamline the design process and keep our team’s prototype designs consistent, I created a design system. It contained:

  1. Color and higher-contrast logo options

  2. Primary and Secondary color palettes

  3. Typography, including headers and body text

  4. Buttons

  5. Miscellaneous Icons

The Prototype

Utilizing the design system, my team and I created a cohesive, interactive prototype. My page of focus was “Product”. I created a stackable set of icons representing each layer of protection Piivately’s cybersecurity product offers. Icons as displayed on the home page:

On the product page I organized these icons alongside their title and description. Based on initial user interviews, I edited product description language to reduce the amount of jargon, and allow users an easier understanding of Piivately’s product. Click below to view the full prototype:

The Next Steps

After usability testing our prototype with Piivately’s potential users, we recommend Piivately move forward with the following next steps:

  1. Create a mobile version of the Piivately website so that it is responsive on all digital devices

  2. Make video on the homepage slightly more animated than the present version.

  3. Conduct A/B testing on the call to action buttons to see what is most effective in driving leads.

  4. Conduct another usability test to pinpoint any areas of opportunities that could help improve the website even further.

The Conclusion

It was a rewarding experience working Piivately’s project alongside my driven, skillful teammates. We each brought different strengths to the table, and I couldn’t have imagined a more cooperative collaboration.

We had the opportunity to present our research, findings, and prototype designs to Prime Digital Academy and Piivately. In addition, we prepared a client handoff package containing an overview of our designs, research findings, and recommendations. View the full report, below.