Case Study

Client: RSA Security,
(Formerly Securant Technologies)

Project: ClearTrust® Application

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Overview

Chroma Design, Usability Design Specialist, and Unger Campbell, Human Factors Specialist, teamed to provide usability analysis, research, and design solutions for RSA Securities’ ClearTrust® Web access management application. The RSA ClearTrust® Web access management solution is an easy-to-deploy, rules-based solution that centrally controls and manages user access privileges to Web-based resources based on definable user attributes, business rules and security policies that directly reflect the objectives of an organization. Each customer decides who gets to access which Web resources, and then the RSA ClearTrust® solution enforces the defined access policies consistently across the e-business. It is used by a number of well-known companies such as Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, Experian, and ADP, and the United States government.

Process

Chroma Design and Unger Campbell were invited to work on a complete usability review of the existing ClearTrust® application and to redesign the interface through a traditional iterative design process that included three user trials. The initial application was desktop based, and one of the additional goals of the project was to create a web-based version of the software.

Dr. Campbell of Unger Campbell identified a wealth of usability improvements at the beginning of the project that were later incorporated into the final designs by Ryan Hanau of Chroma Design. Examples of the type of solutions that were created included the following:

• Provide increased visual guidance to the users to reduce training requirements
• Reduce user errors due to poor visual guidance
• Organize the information so that it matches the user’s mental models
• Provide all of the required, relevant information and remove all unneeded information
• Offer proper confirmation to allow users to view the consequences of their actions
• Offer an intuitive and standards-based navigation
• Replace confusing terminology with understandable descriptions
• Create a simplified, wizard-like interface for beginning users and a more advanced interface for power users

Results

The RSA ClearTrust® product is a leader in user Web access management. It was recently named the best product in its respective market segment, winning Network Computing’s Editor's Choice, NetworkWorld’s Blue Ribbon awards, and NetworkWorld’s "Best of Tests" Award 2002.

The success of the project was also demonstrated by the increased ease of use of the application. The overall metric that Chroma Design and Unger Campbell achieved was to decrease the time that a first time user took to execute a task by 75%. Our client understood that ease of use of their application served to reduce training time and improve the success and marketability of their software product.