Allstate’s Consumer Privacy Tools
2020
Research
Design Strategy
Prototyping
Product Design
Helping consumers take back control of their personal data
Our data is constantly being collected, shared, and sold. Most of us have no idea how many companies have our data or what we’ve actually agreed to let them do with it. To give some control back to consumers and bring Allstate into a new territory, we built tools that send legal privacy requests.
As the lead designer, I led the end-to-end process to redesign the MVP product and incorporate privacy tools into the experience. I worked with a great team of designers, content strategists, product managers, and engineers.
Digital Footprint is a feature offered to consumers through both the Allstate mobile app and the Allstate Identity Protection service.
CONTEXTBefore the California Consumer Privacy Act
Our research continually found that the Digital Footprint MVP left users with a new understanding of who had their data but didn’t give them a clear path of something to do about it. It turned a magical moment of the experience into a pain point. When the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was passed in 2018, a new opportunity to help consumers take back control of their data was introduced. CCPA gives consumers rights to know more about the information being collected about them, remove it, and stop it from being sold.
Validating the opportunity
Working with the Product Management team, we monitored the effects of manually sending privacy requests to various companies and organizations. In the emails, we referenced CCPA as the legal mechanism for requesting that our data be deleted. Over time, our analysis showed a continuous increase in successful responses. More and more companies were honoring the requests, even if we didn’t live in California.
Introducing new concepts to the world
User research on early versions of the privacy tools showed significant discrepancies between what we offered and consumers’ expectations. Comprehension of the concepts was very low. One user thought we might log into her LinkedIn account and change some of the privacy settings automatically. While it is an interesting idea, that was far from what we were doing.
I led the iterative process of improving feature comprehension with another product designer, a content strategist, and an illustrator.
THE SOLUTIONOnboarding to pique interest and set expectations
The concepts are introduced through actionable headlines, additional body copy, and illustrations highlighting new terminology that users see while using the product. When users see these screens, they have a strong understanding of the offering, even when just quickly skimming through.
Experiences that convey the details
Once users are in the product and can send privacy requests, they quickly understand that we help them send legal requests on their behalf to change how their data is being used.
Research on the latest iterations of the full experience showed strong feature comprehension and a strong desire to use the product.
THE RESULTSA competitive differentiator for Allstate Identity Protection
No other identity protection provider offers privacy tools in the employee benefits channel. This differentiator has helped our sales team close more deals in 2020.
Consumer engagement with Allstate
We worked with the Allstate Mobile team to build Digital Footprint and the privacy tools into the Allstate mobile team. This has opened up a new way of engaging consumers with the Allstate brand.
Increased feature activation
The redesigned experience and addition of the privacy features led to a 48% increase in the activation rate.
