Target -
Introducing Passkeys
A cross-platform rollout of a safer, more convenient way for guests to sign in
Client: Target
UI DESIGN • UX RESEARCH • PROTOTYPING + USER TESTING
Passwords: Easy prey for bad actors; easy to forget… And for retailers, forgotten passwords make losing guests + sales, very easy.
How to introduce a safer (but deceptively complex) sign-in method that’s better for business and for guests?
research
With passkeys being fairly emergent tech, my team jumped in to quickly address the learning curve we faced.
The product owner and I built a “Passkeys Hub” in Miro. This served as home to strategy + planning notes…But also to other resources for partners + stakeholders, such as a glossary of terms and FIDO guidelines. Later, the hub would also host UX research findings and lo-fi wireframes.
My competitive audit focused on early adopters across a wide assortment of retail + tech sites. Largely, these experiences seemed either needlessly robust with extraneous features; or oversimplified to the point of failing to address new users’ questions and privacy concerns.
We set out to deliver a happy—and friendlier—medium.
design
Based on the audit’s findings, I moved forward on designs to model what we named as our guests’ core benefits:
Convenience
Minimize steps to create & sign in w/ a passkey
Ease of Use
Provide content with clear explanations, tonally appropriate imagery + discoverable FAQs
Security
Reinforce guests’ sense of security with detailed follow-up content in email confirmations
testing + iteration
User tests saw participants having little to no trouble in creating their own, but they had little interest in further managing them. This would lead to my trimming features even I had thought were not overkill (like an optional field for renaming a passkey.)
Because FIDO predicts passkeys to eventually replace passwords altogether, I also tested several versions of the sign-in page with the passkey option in varyihg degrees of prominence. Though most participants felt comfortable with this button being lower on the page than password entry, they preferred a primary [red] button for both sign-in methods. While it broke convention, we opted to move forward with this solution for launch, to spur adoption.
final
The finished UX trimmed content redundancies while keeping helpful info persistent (even after the guest had made a passkey.)
I also created an illustration supportive of the core benefits & collaborated with our design systems team to produce iconography.
For launch, our strategy to maximize adoption included promoting passkeys at onboarding moments, as well as within ‘reset password’ flows. I also created promo banners to surface this new feature on Account landing pages.
outcomes
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