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ActiveCampaign serves 250k+ customers. We were facing an unusual amount of account takeovers, and customer trust was declining as a result.

My role

Security designer, User Flows, UI Design, Interaction Design, Prototypes, Design Leadership

Results

Reduced account takeovers by 85%

Account takeovers rose 200%. As a result, we needed to act quickly to ensure our customers data remained safe, and we maintain trust.

Our goals were clear: Reduce account takeovers, fraud investigations, and maintain customer trust. We introduced a login challenge that required users to enter a verification code sent to their email before authenticating into the platform.

This project was very time sensitive, and we felt confident in our solution. Although not ideal, sometimes a project requires leaning into your expertise to get a solution out the door quickly.

My team and I dove straight into concepts and design. When working through the user experience, we wanted to avoid adding unnecessary friction to the login experience.

After collaborating internally, we landed on a solution: After the user enters their login credentials, they're presented with a screen prompting them to check their email for a verification code. Entering the correct code successfully authenticates the user. This solution is seen in many authentication flows, and was proven to work.

In order to reduce unnecessary friction, users were only prompted with the "challenge" if we detected a login from an unknown location, browser, and or IP address.

Our customers and support team felt our efforts. The MVPs feature flag was tuned on for 79K high-risk account, and we saw a decrease in account takeovers by 85%.

However, we discovered a larger issue with how customers sign up for their accounts. Many businesses share a login email, which poses a problem for individual users attempting to log in who do not have access to that inbox. In talking with customers, we discovered it would be beneficial to add an option for a verification code to their mobile phones.

More details to come!