The Prompt

Determine the advantages and disadvantages to implementing biometric authentication into the Spectrum product line.

My Process

While working for the research team, I had the opportunity to work on a project for the Identity team. This project concerned the use of biometric authentication for the My Spectrum app. The My Spectrum app allows users to perform actions such as bill pay, report service outages, record future shows, and more. The ID team came to us wondering if it would be beneficial from a user experience perspective to implement TouchID, FaceID or other biometric technologies as a sign in option on the app. The product owner on the ID team was particularly interested in the usage rates for this technology, any impacts that TouchID has on user experience, and possible customer reactions to an implementation of this technology. Thus, the goals of the project were to discover four things:
1. How many users of our customer base have fingerprint or other biometrics capabilities built into their devices.
2. Would this feature improve the overall user experience of the My Spectrum app?
3. Would anybody actually enable these features?
4. if the ID team were to enable these features, what would be the most effective way to incorporate them into the My Spectrum app?

Market State Analysis

To accomplish these goals, we split our research process into three distinct sprints. The first sprint was a market state analysis. A current state analysis is a review of the current state of the technology in question. Our study wanted to examine the growth trends and possible use cases for biometric technology, primarily among our customer base. We were able to find a variety of actionable insights in this space. For example, we found that almost 71% of consumer devices will have biometric technology built in by the end of the year. We also found that the explosion of biometrics for authentication is being fueled by the high adoption rates in the mobile phone space, but also by other spaces as well. We found that the more often users come in contact with a type of biometric authentication the more likely they are to implement it in apps similar to My Spectrum. For example, airport security has started to allow passengers to utilize shorter TSA lines if they use their fingerprint prior to going through the conveyor belt lines. Another aspect of this study was to look at how our users were likely to trust biometrics as a safe authentication method. By asking this question, we were able to find that fingerprint was the most trusted method, followed by a retina scan and an alphanumeric password. Interestingly, we found that users trusted face authentication the least, with only 12% of respondents considering face as the most secure form of authentication. This type of study is intended to influence design decisions by allowing the design team to be fully informed on the possible advantages and limitations of a technology before they implement it. On the right are some examples of the insights we found.

Competitive Analysis

Another facet of this study was a competitive analysis. A competitive analysis is a look at other implementations of this tech to see what other players in the space are doing and to learn from their implementations. The goal of this study was to improve efficiency in the design process by analyzing final design implementations before starting our own design process. This allows the team to make early decisions on what works well and what doesn’t - allowing us to be able to only pursue implementations that fit well within our design language and maintain consistency in our line of products. Our study focused on three aspects of biometric authentication: the process for enabling biometric authentication, authenticating using biometrics, and error handling.

One finding from this study that I found particularly intriguing was the ways in which the apps in our study handled secondary authentication methods. Each of our app has different ways in which they allowed users to authenticate if their phones couldn’t recognize their biometric token. For example, the Starbucks app had users create a unique passcode in case it failed, whereas Robinhood had users enter their main phone lock screen passcode. We also found that all our apps started looking for their biometric token right as the app was opened, therefore prioritizing efficiency over user choice. Below are some additional findings from our study from the final slide deck.

User Feedback Review

Finally, the last aspect of this study was a User Feedback review. This type of review involves reading any self-reported complaints or compliments submitted online about the use of the feature in question. For this study, that primarily involved combing through thousands of app reviews on each mobile operating system respective apps stores and looking for references that are likely to have any relation to the apps use of biometrics. We reviewed 5 different applications, Robinhood, Xfinity Home, myAT&T, Last Pass and Chase Mobile. We choose these apps for a variety of reasons. Each application operates in a different competitive market, therefore giving us a user base most represented of the general public. We also wanted to focus on applications that handled sensitive data, such as the investments and savings app Robinhood, as well as apps that did not inherently handle sensitive data. Our findings led us to some very interesting conclusions. For example, we found that if a company is going to add biometrics, it needs to add them to their entire mobile line of products. the iPad app for Chase bank, for example, does not have TouchID support. However, the iPhone version does, leading to users to be very frustrated with being forced to remember and enter their password on one version of the app, and using biometrics to authenticate in a different version of the same app. In fact, we found that this inconsistency completely dominated the app reviews section and was the only major issue consistent with most of the unfavorable reviews of the app. Another interesting finding we found in this study was the that if an apps implementation of biometrics was unreliable, users would rather them not implement it at all. Too often users will be prompted to use their thumb to log in, successfully authenticate, only to be required to enter their password anyway. This infuriated users and left them feeling cheated. From these reactions, our recommendations to the ID team were to perform extensive testing to ensure 100% reliability before the update would be rolled out to the general public.