Case Study
Self service for developers
In a nutshell
With the goal to reduce support time, my team and I built a self service that gives users more visibility and control over consent-related configurations for their applications.
Background
With Volkswagen ID users can login into multiple services and applications of the Volkswagen group developed by different internal and external teams. My team and I worked on the consent feature of the login flow. On the surface, it’s that screen where users accept that their data is being processes. In the background, it makes sure things are going the legally correct way.
Problem
With the new GDPR requirements coming to effect in May 2018, having legally compliant consent configurations became a top need for developers building services and applications using Volkswagen ID for their login flow. This caused a lot of work for our small team who did both product development and support for Volkswagen ID’s consent feature.
One day our product manager approached me with the idea of building a self service to reduce the amount of support work and give more power to the end user. I loved the idea and over time we convinced our product owner to make the self service top priority.
My role
I designed the self service along all phases of the user-centered design process, from research, to prototyping and user testing to crafting micro interactions and a logo. As my team didn’t have a designer for a while, my job was also to involve them in my process and help them see the product from the user’s perspective.
Approach
Consent meets techies
To design a consent self service with developers as users in mind, I first needed to understand a few things:
Context: In which situations do users need consent from their users?
Tasks: What do users need to set up consent requests for their applications?
Tools: What do users currently use to set up consent requests?
Expertise: How experienced are users with setting up consent requests?
Constraints: What level of security is needed so that the configuration has the right legal effects?
Using the team’s knowledge
Given my team were users themselves and also were in close contact to users due to support work, I used their knowledge as much as I could to answer the questions above. We collaborated closely on the whiteboard to map flows, define information hierarchy and identify tasks the user needs to accomplish.
Result
After several design iterations and user tests, our 'Consent Self Service' went live in October 2018 and is now used by all apps which use Volkswagen ID as their login provider.
In the beginning, it only had one feature: Grouping applications that share the same consent. But this feature alone and the fact that users had visibility over their consent configurations reduced the number of support tickets by around 30%. This in turn gave my team’s developers up to 8 hours more time per week to work on the product.