Experience is What Counts, Orchestration is How you Get There

Yeah. Well, yeah. Thank you.

As, as mentioned my name Isman, I'm a senior solutions architect at ping identity working across AMEA with the folks on the duck region. And today I'll be talking about the challenges of creating a great user experience with the tools and building blocks, which are, which are available to us and how an orchestration can, can help with improving that those, those experiences, or getting, getting around those challenges, experiences, what counts orchestration is, how you get there. So to speak as it's customer, I'd like to start with a couple numbers per, per, per study done by ping identity.

63% of users are likely to leave an online journey and go to a competitor. Then logging in authenticating becomes too cumbersome. And 77% of users are likely to, to skip registration and go, go, go somewhere else. If a registration becomes too complex, requires too many, too many fields has, has, or ask for too much information. And executives also agree that that identity security is a key enabler for, for, for extraordinary user experiences. So just to let it sink in three quarters of, of users are likely to abandon a shopping cart. If the registration is, is, is subpar.

And two thirds may even, even though they have an account, they may just skip continuing doing what they're doing. If authentication becomes too too difficult, and executives are also aligned with that view in a sense.

Now, everybody has a rough idea about what a good experience should look like at least at a high level. For, for the purpose of this presentation, I'll focus on a single specific user journey, a basic one and authentication, which I'll go through multiple times in different iterations, but this does apply to other user journeys as well. Similarly will see a relative easier or a relative simple representation, but it's a bit more complex at times talking about no authentication. It's very simple. The user wants to have access to something you capture in validate credentials.

And yeah, if it all works well, it's success, champagne, fireworks, et cetera. What the reality is a bit more complex than this. So I have another representation of the same. It's still a simplified version. Being able to put a complete journey on a single slide is, is a bit of a challenge, but a more envision or the envision visionary experience in a sense, often authentication will start. Similarly. A user wants to access wants, wants to have access, but here in order to improve security, as well as the user experience, you will probably start with a fraud check.

So is it some fraudulent experience then you'll oops. I don't know where to point this, but somewhere there, if, if there's no reason to suspect suspect fraud, you'll ask them for their email address. Then you might check if there is even a user with that email address, if not, then you send them over to, to a registration flow, which I won't continue in this session.

If there is a user, then you might ask them for their password in order to continue that authentication journey, you might even give them the option of using a magic link, which is sent to them via email so that they can quickly and easily access. Again. I won't go in that direction as well. Assuming that the user hasn't their password, you would go and verify the credentials which have been provided then perhaps evaluate risk. Is it a risky transaction?

If so, trigger multifactor of indication, if not, and proceed directly to the next step of a progressive profiling. The reason why we do this is yeah, we want to make registration as easy as possible, and then ask for some additional information as the user passes by eventually fulfilling the journey in a successful manner. It's quite a journey where we try to increase our security by checking for fraud, checking for risk, trying to make the experience as, as, as good as possible for, for the end user themselves.

But again, this is a simplified version, the happy path, without any errors or anything more realistic or a real vision from a customer use case, looks a bit more like this, or it goes even more towards the right here, which is a bit difficult to put on a slide or build it up in a slide as I did with the, with the simpler version. Now, once you have a vision, so, you know what you, what experience should look like it comes down to yeah. Picking the right solution in order to fulfill that.

For that, I'd like to take a look at the identity landscape as it is today that the iden the identity space has grown immensely. Over the last years, we are talking about tens of billions of dollars big nowadays. And while a couple decades ago, everything was a bit more monolithic. You had a single vendor, which that everything for you, or there was only one topic nowadays, we talk about the number of different distinct areas from single sign on to identify verification, privileged access management authorization as well. And so on. It's not an exhaustive list.

There is much more to it, of course. And similarly, the number of vendors has also increased over time here, some examples, so kind of letting it rain here. This is in no way, an exhaustive list of vendors who play in the identity space. It's just to show that there are so many of them giving you kind of the idea of, of what we're talking about. I I'm sure I missed a lot of important ones. Please. Don't be mad at me because of that.

Some of these vendors do provide suites, which cover multiple topics, multiple areas in order to fulfill some generic or some more specific requirements, depending on, on the use cases and so on. Whereas some others do offer point solutions. So very specific identity, verification, authorization, multifactor authentication, and so on. And there are some which focus more on certain areas. Be it geographic, be it, be it beat on verticals and similar identity.

Verifi, for instance, may differ for north America versus APAC or fraud detection will be likely different for a, an online banking scenario versus an eCommerce scenario. Now that we have an overview of all these different or all the options, which are out there, the whole landscape, let's switch back to our whiteboard here and think on how we can proceed. How can we fulfill this vision, which we had, there are two options or, or much rather a spectrum between two ends.

The first one is you go with a single solution, which also means that you need to revise the great vision that you have dropping some bits and, and trying to fit within the space which you haven't provided, or the functionality which you have been provided by that specific vendor. It's, it's a bit a shame. If you think about it, all that brain power, you have invested in creating that, that vision and then dropping half of it decreasing the user experience as well as the security is, is, is less than ideal.

On the other end, you can work with multiple vendors, maybe one which does, which covers a number of your requirements completed with, with some point solutions. And there might even be certain areas where you need more than a single vendor, more than a single solution with this, you, you may be able to cover the whole vision or the whole flow, which you have envisioned, but getting them together is then the next challenge, let's take all these building blocks, which we have.

Let's consider also a frame, an application, mobile application, web application, identity provider, whichever, and try to fit all these different building blocks, which we, which we have into, into that frame. You might try something like this, or maybe this, or perhaps this have three of these slides. Don't worry.

What, what you'll notice in each of these, there is a certain white space, or let me highlight some gray space in between, which represents the actual customer work. You might need to get all these different pieces, work together, integrating everything, making the decisions, which one kicks in at, at which point and similar, which you hard code, which you, which you may need to hard code, which you may need to develop some custom pieces for so that everything comes together for one big solution. So once you've done that, you have done your hard coding. You have done your custom work then.

Yeah. Our landscape changes constantly. So there's always something new around the corner. One colleague or some colleagues come, come around the corner with a new idea. Since your user base, everyone uses smartphones. For instance, they want to introduce QR based authentication or a zero login. So to speak. It's actually very easy. You display a QR code early on while you also ask for email address, but instead you show QR code, use a scans, QR code, they do a touch ID, face ID, and they're authenticated. Everybody's happy.

And, and it's a improved user experience. So to speak, this might, this may need that. Or this is a new functionality, which you need to add. It may even be a new vendor, which you need to introduce. So a new building block for, for our solution here, let's get that over here.

You need, you somehow need to fit this into your solution. It doesn't really look like it will fit like this right away.

So you'll, you'll need to move things around, make some space. And then yeah, you have now the space where you can put it into.

And now, now, now you have that additional capability as well, quick and easy, right? Maybe less. So you had to do some substantial changes to that gray space in between so far that it's actually a different kind of gray space now. So there is a certain development effort which goes in for, for, for that easy, easy change. Even that was 1, 1, 1 rectangle, which you added, maybe you want to add something else which displays a circle as a triangle, whichever it's always in more work to get these introduced added to, to your solution. It's not just the addition.

So there are also scenarios, maybe one of your building blocks during upgrade has some additional capabilities. So it has grown that way. And you want to add that to your solution. Now we have some overlap and you need to reconsider which way to go, or maybe you want to remove something. So you change direction. And then yeah, there's some more gray space behind that.

It, it, it becomes a hassle to, to go through these changes. Another thing is, yeah, maybe you don't want to commit to a change. You want just, you just want to try something if it works out, great, roll it out to everyone.

If not, then roll it back. All of these become a hassle. So to speak, become a difficult, difficult thing to do.

Now, all that tangram like slides before. It was just about a single journey. Everything, a single container we've been talking about.

Well, it's more likely that you have multiple journeys. You might have registrations profile management authorization. And so on. You may be talking about multiple web applications or multiple mobile applications.

So any changes you you want to do are kind of multiply it amongst these different aspects, multiple experiences, multiple applications that, that, and, and it becomes even more difficult and challenging to make changes so much so that at certain point it might make, it might look more sensible to not do anything instead of making changes everywhere, which of course doesn't have a, any positive impact at least on user experience. So what, what to do, you might be saying, or when is he going to talk about orchestration?

Let's, let's proceed for that. I'll I'd like to start with defining orchestration or identity orchestration in general. First orchestration is an integration integration framework to create extraordinary identity experiences, which we are longing for by putting together the different solutions functionalities, which may come from multiple vendors, which might, which may be off the shelf, open source, homegrown, et cetera, getting that right flow together.

It does provide a centralization of, of experience designs, meaning that there is certain consist between different, different channels, and you don't have to hard code any experiences within applications, but rather you let the applications ask a centralized orchestration platform. What to do. It does enable flexible and adaptive journeys, which can take into consideration transactional and contextual information. The Avaya enable cross channel consistency.

As I mentioned, familiarity of different journeys, even if you are on a different application or you're trying to do something different. And finally, ideally it should also provide a higher level mode of configuration and intuitive way through low or no code through drag and drop and similar so that you can open up the design of journeys to a broader, to a broader group within the organization. Now let's go back to, oh, look better at home. Let's go back to the, the, the earlier journey, which we had and replaced the middle part with orchestration in this case.

So it's kind of outsourcing the actual user journey to, to a, to an orchestration platform. So the application calls out that platform for, for the authentication journey, which we have defined the defined here, which makes it from an application point of view, an easy task, indeed again, looked better at home and let's take a closer look at that blue box, the orchestration platform itself, and take a peek on what, how it looks, looks like over there.

It, it, the bottom part, which is from the orchestration platform might look familiar. That is because it's the same vision which we had before, which we now create within the orchestration platform, which opens up a lot of new possibilities for us, starting with how we actually fulfill that vision.

When we use orchestration compared to a, a non orchestration scenario with orchestration, you would be more focusing on the single steps on the single notes, and to try to find the right solution for that specific, for that specific point and make use of those without having to really think about how am I eventually going to get everything together, how am I going to stitch those together? Cause that part will be taken care of by the orchestration platform itself. And how about new ideas? Yeah.

If you want to add something new, as I mentioned that drag and drop UI is we'll, we'll make the whole configuration and everything much more straightforward forward, smoother. We'll open it up to more parties, more people who can look into that dropping in notes, making the connections, making, making the necessary changes so that you can add or improve your landscape in, in, in general.

And yeah, well talking about that, we have created a fake QR code flow in there, as well as in addition to the previous one. Now we've been looking at it from an orchestration platform, point of view, or my last couple slides. What about the application? So what happens on the application side or what changes for the application? This is a bit difficult to, to show on a slide because it's actually nothing changes for an application. So all I can do is strike that through. So from an application point of view, you don't need to change anything.

Everything happens within the orchestration platform, where you have the option of combining things as you want, or making changes as you want. Similarly, you, you may also find a better solution for a specific note. Let's take, for instance, the risk risk management or the risk assessment. Not there. What you can do through orchestration is just rip that out, put in the new one and be done with it. But you may also approach it a bit more with care. Yeah.

Approach the same, a bit more with care, and instead of a rip and replace, you might initially try a new solution with a certain subgroup of your population. If things work out fine, if not, then you may, you might want to roll it back again, try a different approach, maybe a different solution even. And if everything is good, then you can roll it out to the whole population, making that change, making, making AB testing while rolling out changes in a sense.

And once again, no changes to the application, which is a key part of this, but it goes also a bit beyond no application changes due to the centralized nature of an orchestration platform. You may have multiple applications, which point to the same platform to the same user experience, which enables that cross channel consistency from an end user perspective, giving, giving them that same familiar user experience, even though they are on a different application, which minimizes the risk of them or lowers the risk of them dropping the transaction or the path which they are on. Yeah.

Actually with that, I come to my, to my final slide here, as initially mentioned, experience is, is very important nowadays. So it's how you make your user happy, how you make sure that they come back again and orchestration is kind of the way or paves the way towards great, great experiences. In other words, coming back to the first slide again, experiences what counts and, and orchestration is how you get there. Thank you for bearing with me for those past 20 minutes.

And yeah, if, if you'd like to talk more about, yeah, I'll take questions, but if, if, if it doesn't, if the time doesn't permit, please come by our booth and no.