The Challenge
A major credit reporting bureau was experiencing a high number of support calls from customers of their Identity Monitoring service. These customers were receiving emails alerting them to potential fraud and compromised information. However, they didn’t understand exactly what happened nor what they could do to remedy the situation. The credit reporting company came to us to help them better understand user needs and for recommendations on revising their email alerts.
Our Approach
A researcher and I first set up a round of interviews to understand users’ current experience with the ID Monitoring service and articulate their needs. From the synthesis of these “perception interviews,” we formed experience and editorial principles — these would inform my content rewrites. We then followed with a round of content tests and validation to gauge the effectiveness of potential changes.
At the end of the testing sessions, we had a validated set of content recommendations to hand over to the client’s editorial team. The artifacts I delivered included sample revised email alerts, a template for the new email alert format, and a set of editorial guidelines for the team to follow.
The Results
The engagement ended at deliverable handoff, so we weren’t involved in implementing our recommendations. However, we did see a turnaround of participant sentiment from the first round to the last of the testing sessions. Upon reviewing the revised alerts, one participant said, “I have a limited budget. This is something I’d actually pay for” — a great statement of value.
We captured common keywords from user interviews.
I created editorial principles based on the keywords and insights we captured during user sessions. I used these principles to inform the voice, tone, & content of the revised notifications.
We showed users variations on indicators to see which would most effectively communicate their level of risk.
I tested different section headers for tone and clarity.
We created this test to help identify what users responded to best in the copy — and what they didn’t find helpful.
The original email alert was a jumbled block of text. I rewrote and reformatted the alert to include a clear content hierarchy with instructive sections and subheds.