McAfee at a glance

I didn't expect my time at McAfee to leave such a lasting mark on my career. I joined right as the enterprise product was being spun off into its own entity, leaving the newly rebranded consumer product as the company's sole focus. That timing put me in the middle of rolling the new brand identity out across mobile, desktop, and application experiences, and gave me an huge opportunity to shape how it all came together.

The design team itself was lean, just 30 people spread across several product lines, but it punched well above its size. Senior designers took real ownership of their areas while mentoring the juniors coming up, and that culture of support is a big part of why the team was able to move as fast as it did.

McAfee was a name I'd long admired, and I was determined to make the most of it. Here are three of the biggest projects I contributed to:

• Reimagined the e-commerce flow, from landing page through checkout and payment
• Refined the application's login experience for first-time install
• Researched and helped develop McAfee's first approach to multi-account and multi-device management

In my first few months at McAfee, I brought my background in e-commerce, specifically pay-per-click campaigns driving traffic to landing pages that convert into sales, to a problem the company needed to solve. Those visitors could be new customers, existing ones, or people who'd left us in the past, and research into the purchase flow revealed a common thread: users were confused by our product offerings and how they could save money across multiple devices and family plans.

To tackle it, the design team pulled in stakeholders from across the company, from VPs and directors to individual contributors, for a two-week sprint aimed at aligning on what everyone actually needed and finding the best way to deliver it. We split into groups to brainstorm independently, generating multiple approaches to the new e-commerce flow before synthesizing them into a single golden path. From there, I partnered with a PM and a junior designer to draft the new flow and build out the wireframes.

Passions ran high throughout the sprint, as stakeholders across the organization pushed to make sure their priorities were represented. As the senior designer on the project, I made it my job to listen to every voice at the table and translate that input into a flow that worked, one that ultimately increased conversion through the funnel by more than 20%.

Delivering a new dynamic landing page

Alongside the broader e-commerce flow, we also redesigned the core landing page experience itself. The goal was a page that could adapt dynamically based on what we already knew about a customer before they ever clicked through. Drawing on lessons learned from our previous landing pages, we built a system where individual sections could swap in and out on the fly depending on that customer data, delivering a more relevant experience from the very first impression.

McAfee Total Protection is the core application behind the entire product experience. Through partnerships with PC manufacturers like HP and Lenovo, our software came preinstalled on new machines, which meant the first-launch experience needed to make it effortless for a user to create an account so we could begin protecting them right away. Those protections include:

• Antivirus
• Identity protection
• Browser history protection
• Password management

While McAfee's core application wrapper was already secure on its own, we saw an opportunity to unify the experience: a single login that let users move seamlessly between the desktop application, the web browser, and their mobile device.

The flow worked like this: a user would open McAfee on their desktop and be prompted to visit a web browser to enter their email address. From there, they'd receive a one-time-use password, which they'd use to set a personalized password and log in, automatically carrying that session back into the application.

As McAfee sharpened its focus on the core consumer experience, it became clear that user and device management needed to be consolidated into something far simpler, a single account that could protect not just one device, but an entire family's worth. This was uncharted territory for McAfee. Working closely with a researcher, we interviewed users who represented exactly the kind of household we were designing for.

Those interviews surfaced some genuine surprises in how people expected the experience to work. McAfee's user base spans a wide range of ages, backgrounds, and regions across the globe, which meant the solution had to be simple and intuitive enough for absolutely anyone to complete with nothing more than a web browser.

I partnered one-on-one with the researcher and worked closely with the account product manager to design an all-in-one interface, one that let users invite family members into the account and send install links directly to their other devices. It was a substantial undertaking, and the many flows and use cases we documented along the way ended up directly shaping the final results.