I was the sole designer tasked with completely refreshing the world’s #1 password manager. The process spanned the full spectrum of product design from initial discovery and user research to high-fidelity visuals. The redesign positively impacted LastPass’s user growth and played a role in LogMeIn’s acquisition of LastPass.
Design Team:
Product Design lead (me)
Skills:
Product Design, Design Systems, Leadership, User Research, Collaboration, Visual Design
Project Duration:
10 months
A quirky UX
LastPass launched in 2008 as a fledgling product that solved customers’ password problems. In 2013, LastPass launched its 3.0 update, yet there needed to be a designer on the team to support the launch. The company regularly received user feedback revealing “the product is awesome,” yet “the user interface and experience are pretty terrible.” By the time I joined the team in mid-2014, the product was showing its’ age. I was the sole designer at LastPass, which meant I worked on marketing, product design, user research, and everything in between for our B2B and B2C offerings across web, mobile, and wearables. A redesign was clearly on the horizon, as the LastPass codebase had years of bloat built in. The drive for the redesign came straight from Joe Siegrist, founder, and CEO of LastPass.
The LastPass 3.0 product.
Building the dream team
The first order of business was forming a team capable of delivering the 4.0 redesign efficiently and swiftly. The team was lean and certainly not the size one would expect for such an enormous ambition. The core 4.0 redesign team consisted of one developer rebuilding the web extension from the ground up, one product designer (yours truly) recreating the entire user interface and experience, one quality assurance employee verifying that shipping 4.0 met all quality requirements, and a small marketing team delivering the go-to-market strategy and collateral. There was a strong desire to keep all current functionality in the redesign while developing innovative product features to keep LastPass competitive.
Rebuilding the behemoth
The best part of working in a wholly bootstrapped startup was no project deadlines. It was also the worst part – no deadlines meant completing the project as soon as possible, as our success or failure depended on it. The team didn’t have to align with quarterly goals or metrics but instead deliver on the promise of simplifying security faster than the competition.
We started with a brainstorming workshop where all the team members and stakeholders could ideate on new features and functionality. Some of the biggest takeaways were a new “emergency access” feature, where a user could bequeath their sensitive data to an assigned person after a specific time, a redesigned sharing center, and a visual refresh with an all-new grid view to complement the traditional list view. After the workshop, I sketched various approaches and socialized them around the office. While I was working on that, our developer re-engineered many lines of antiquated code, utilizing improvements to the coding language, considering the various web browsers that LastPass operates on, and verifying that we considered accessibility when building the product. We logically divvied the work, separating significant tasks into smaller, digestible pieces and rapidly burned through our to-do lists.
Brainstorming LastPass 4.0 and sketches of early concepts.
Next, I set up usability interviews through UserTesting to get user feedback on some of the higher-fidelity mockups I had designed. These focused on our new features. I received valuable reactions regarding the grid view, the sharing center, and the security aspects of emergency access.
As the team progressed, I facilitated weekly check-ins with the leadership team to verify that we were taking suitable approaches. I thoroughly enjoyed this time, as the CEO trusted that the team and I would launch a successful redesign of this product. As a whole, things progressed onward until we were ready to launch LastPass 4.0.
High-fidelity iterations of the grid and list view for usability testing.
An all-new LastPass experience
Weeks before the launch of 4.0, LogMeIn, one of the world’s top ten SaaS companies with over $1 billion in revenue, acquired LastPass. After launch, the 4.0 release was well-received both internally and externally. LastPass had become the hottest product at LogMeIn. In an email from Bill Wagner, LogMeIn’s CEO, our humble team was acknowledged and congratulated. In it, he specifically stated, “I’d especially like to acknowledge and thank Scott Jemielity, who was the lead on the very well-received UI/UX redesign.” The 4.0 launch was also significant in the press, gaining excellent PR from major news sources such as PC Mag, Android Authority, and ZDnet.
Positive press for LastPass 4.0 from around the internet.
The team had achieved success. We made data-driven decisions and delivered a vastly improved user experience, a logical new information architecture, a bold user interface, and new features to boot. The 4.0 release gave us a solid new foundation for LogMeIn to build on. It reinvigorated the entire organization to deliver its best work.
The final product – LastPass 4.0, the most successful company launch to date.
If I still need to sell you, try out LastPass yourself. Head to the website, download the web extension and let LastPass remembers all your passwords, so you don’t have to.