Clayton Harding

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McAfee VPN

McAfee's VPN is one of 13 security tools, often bundled in protection plans. After it's MVP launch, the tool was not being maintained by a dedicated team and amassed considerable tech debt.

McAfee's VPN is one of many security tools, often bundled in protection plans. Over time, the tool had fallen behind as updates rolled out to newer products, and was not being maintained by a dedicated team.

To address long-standing pain points and it's outdated MVP, I assisted with early research, feature planning, and end-to-end designs.

With Susanna Huang, Nina Wang, Jeffrey Jose & Jen Barrell.

TIMELINE

Nov—Jan 2024

My role

Product designer

Platform

Mobile

Native app

Extra context

In case you didn't know, VPNs mask your location and keeps online activity private

It's like driving a car with tinted windows.

By encrypting internet traffic and masking the users location, VPNs keeps online activity private from bad people that want to steal passwords, credit card details, or private messages.

And yes, it can also let you stream geo-blocked TV shows from other countries you normally can't see.

Name: Clayton Harding

IP Address: 2948JHDD387

UNKNOWN USER

PROBLEM

First-time users found their VPN confusing and didn't know what it did

This led to low adoption-rate and lapsing subscriptions

To the general public, VPNs are still relatively unknown tech, so when anyone stumbles into the tool, it's likely their first time interacting with a VPN.

Since this is part of a bigger ecosystem, the time we have to educate, onboard and show immediate value proved to be our biggest challenge we faced.

Lapsing subscriptions

Without a clear purpose, we saw a decline in users renewing their VPN subscription

Old interface needed face lift

The old UI was made for an MVP and is using legacy assets

Lack of product education

We know from the flow that there is a lack of education on what a VPN does, when to use it etc.

We need to better communicate how our VPN is protecting the users privacy → contextual to when they use it.

Unlike security software that shows what dangers they stopped, VPNs work by making you invisible to threats, making it difficult to show their value.

Over time, we hypothesize users will instinctively turn on their VPN when a connection feels unsafe.

This is the first point I'm going to make

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The second point is also important

Finally, this is what we ended up with, personally I think it's pretty nice

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How do you visualize something that you can't prove?

Unlike security software that shows what dangers they stopped

PROBLEM

Users struggled to understand what a VPN does, and when to use it

"It's on, but nothing happened, is it doing something?"

Unlike security software that shows what dangers they stopped, VPNs work by making you invisible to threats, making it difficult to show their value.

Without a clear purpose, we saw a decline in users renewing their VPN subscription

1/3

How we tightened up the motion, spotlight the fun features in these sections

Unlike security software that shows what dangers they stopped, VPNs work by making you invisible to threats, making it difficult to show their value. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur.