My name’s Simon, and this blog is an intro to my impartial UX review of MIRACL.
I’m extremely cynical of new technology, and jaded too. In my last proper job as Global SVP of Customer Experience of a major e-commerce agency I got maybe 5 emails a day from some new platform or another. Most were digital mutton dressed up as online lamb.
So why am I here, obviously excited about MIRACL and the fantastic potential it has to transform UX? Well, to explain that, and why it could be interesting to you – let’s make it a bit more fun and play a game.
Imagine you’re running an online company with a big customer base, which in the past has been fantastically successful, and has a super premium set of products, but is in danger of being overhauled by more modern, sleeker competitors who run a tighter ship.
Now, let’s add in something perhaps not so imaginary, your investors are demanding you make more money. Lots more money! In fact, one of them, a sweaty looking bloke with a bald head who shouts a lot, is ‘suggesting’ to you that you’re going to be out on your ear unless you dramatically improve things! More money!
Being a bit entrepreneurial and rebellious, you instinctively want to tell him to stick it up his sales funnel, but you don’t. Sadly, your plans for your immensely relaxing future depend upon satisfying him.
Now, here’s the challenge you face to win our little game. What to do?
- Your brand - is it in great shape? Yes it is.
- What about your product lineup? Yes, all good. Pricey but superb.
- Fulfilment, customer service … all good, yes?
- Marketing? Yup, new people are slowly filtering through.
So what are you left with?
You already know that there is one obvious answer. Your customer experience.
You understand your most valuable customers are the ones who have already signed up: it’s so much easier to encourage existing customers to come back more often and buy more stuff than it is to rely on squeezing new customers harder!
Now the game is on in earnest. Your conversion rate optimisation team and your UX specialists tell you there’s a hit list to go through, majoring around a granular review of every tiny detail of your customer journey. So, you review personas, examine experience maps and pain points. You dive into the data so much you start dreaming about Google Analytics sales funnels!
Could a sticky basket work better on the mobile site? Could an annoying exit pop-up work with a special offer before people leave, or will that mess up the brand? What about your technical SEO?
But the innovative and creative side of you is fully aware that you’re treading a well-worn path here, fighting for lots of tiny little uplift opportunities. Never mind you seem to have this same conversation every year either internally or with some agency or another.
Now – here’s where you get to win the game: tell me, what are you missing?
- Is there anything out there which will have a much bigger impact on customer experience?
- That will get the sales bells dinging with a huge uplift in conversion rates?
- Maybe something which isn’t usually considered an opportunity by UX, CRO, IT and strategy teams, never mind aggressive investors?
- Something easy to implement?
- Something secure that will increase data security and put paid to worries of that other nightmare always lurking in the background – a data breach.
- That will dramatically reduce costs such as that painfully pricey customer support function?
So what is it? What is the UX magic bullet? Got an idea?
The answer is of course …. a massive Black Friday sale!
No, only kidding. The real answer is something I started realising piece by piece the more time I spent looking into MIRACL. It’s the reason I agreed to review their product and write this blog.
The answer is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, their stunningly simple and secure account creation and login technology MIRACL Trust.
I think their strap line ‘the login you love’ does summarise it quite well, although there’s more to it.
The way I think of it, is that MIRACL’s simple four digit PIN number it is the perfect replacement for passwords.
And why would you want to replace passwords you may ask?
Well, the one-liner there is that they are ancient, unreliable, hard to remember, and insecure.
That’s why every single secure online environment, from logging in at work to your online bank, has extra levels of authentication on top of passwords, such as an SMS code or whatever. Passwords just don’t work any more.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I’m very sceptical about things. But the more I looked into MIRACL, the more it turned into that eponymous gift that keeps on giving.
Every single aspect of it seems to have been thought through. There is a level of cryptographic security that would make Alan Turing blush. It’s ridiculously easy-to-use. It increases conversion rates dramatically and has a phenomenally high success rate.
In many ways, it’s a bit like comparing Netflix to a VHS video player. One is easy to use, instant, quite cheap and modern. The other one is a pile of old useless wires and electronics that cost a fortune, was always going wrong and was difficult to use.
When you compare the simplicity of using a completely secure four digit PIN against the technological spaghetti of usernames, passwords, and multi-factor authentication, the conclusion that is inescapable. MIRACL is better.
The only downside I can think of with MIRACL, is that you’re not going to know what to do with half of your customer support team and those expensive IT security contractors that fly around the fringes of most serious companies.
To get under the skin of it all, I interviewed some key players at MIRACL and did my own test of comparing logging in via MIRACL against logging into a Chrome browser.
I also ran some insightful and illuminating research with real customers out there to see what they thought. The results were fascinating and dare I say it, in some cases, really quite funny!
If, like me, you’re part of the UX community, or just interested in it, you’re going to easily and naturally find something of interest in the article I put together.
Download The Report Here
Once you’ve read it, it would be really fascinating to get your feedback, and see what you think!
Thanks for your time.
Simon
