Background
Meta FinTech's Trust and Safety team develops and deploys payment solutions to safeguard financial transactions. I led the effort to overhaul the content for Step-Up authentication screens, T&S’ flagship product. Step-Ups are a fraud prevention system used across Meta apps - particularly Shops and Marketplace. Common forms of Step-Ups include SMS two-factor authentication (2FA) and biometric facial recognition, among others.
Process
When I joined, Step-Up screens were creating friction for legitimate users, leading to blocks and support inquiries. This was especially so with the Soft Descriptor Challenge (SDC), MFT’s flagship fraud prevention system. Confusing SDC content resulted in low completion rates, manual reviews by the Ops team, and user abandonment. After collaborative UXR sessions, I redesigned the SDC content and UX flows with a focus on consistency, simplicity, and user-centric design, improving accuracy and user experience.
Solution
Consistency:
In addition to SDC, I developed a redesign for all Meta Step-Ups, including CVV, One-Time-Password, and PIN. The result was streamlined Step-Up content that gave the users a consistent experience across Meta apps, as well as mobile.
Framework:
After the content update, I developed the Unified Step-Ups Framework, driving consistency for Step-Up content across all Meta products, influencing product strategy company-wide. This framework, based on design process and test analysis, cut meetings by 35% during the next MFT Step-Up production cycle, saving time and effort for content, design, and engineering.
Big win:
These updates translated to a $167 million revenue increase for Meta in the first year of implementation alone.
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Quote from Shalabh Jain, architect and tech lead for the Unified Step-Up platform project: “The new SDC UI is so much better than the previous. So many redundancies and UI content issues have been resolved in the new version, all due to Sam’s work."
