Guide to Designing Your User Permission Flow
April 24, 2024
Julien Belisle
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April 24, 2024
Julien Belisle
The deck focuses on user-permission data, meaning at some point end-users (individuals or businesses) will need to provide consent, select a data source, and securely authenticate by sharing their user credentials (username, password, MFA) through our secure platform.
Security and trust are always crucial considerations in the user experience of credential sharing. This is why we aim to exceed industry standards in terms of data security and privacy. We continuously invest in security so our clients can maintain their peace of mind.
Now back to your user-permission flow, in this section, we will cover the various options when conceptualizing your user experience and integration:
Difficulty level: Average (15-40 hours of work)
In this flow, a customer would embed the Link widget via SDKs directly within their website, application, or platform so that end-users can connect their accounts without ever leaving the customer environment. The Link editor offers an easy way for customers to adjust the Link interface design, choose a language, filter sources (by type and location), and input company information. By creating multiple teams, you can use multiple Link widgets with unique parameters within your user flows.
An important consideration will be where and when to ask end-users to connect. Asking a user to connect an account early in the onboarding process might increase drop-off, and asking too late might extend your time to make a decision. Once the connection is successful, the user can be redirected to the next step or drop off until we collect the data in the background.
The customer can then retrieve the data via a use case-specific endpoint using the Deck API. The data is returned in JSON and/or a file.
Difficulty level: Simple (5-10 hours of work)
In this flow, a customer would embed the Link widget via SDKs directly within their website, application, or platform so that end-users can connect their accounts without ever leaving the customer environment. However, their internal collaborators would use the Deck self-serve (no-code) dashboard to view the end-users' connected account(s) data, saving time and resources by not implementing the API endpoints with existing systems.
Difficulty level: Expert (40-80 hours of work)
In this flow, a customer is looking to leverage an end-to-end API experience to completely own the front-end user connectivity UX. This allows for greater flexibility and a more native UX, but requires a more complex implementation.
Difficulty level: No-Code (Less than 1 hour)
In this flow, customers can quickly start using a self-serve, turnkey dashboard in a site-based environment, ideal for sustainability, energy management, and bill payments.
Admins can swiftly configure the account, including uploading a site list and assigning site managers who will be responsible for the account connections. Pre-built notifications automate the task of asking internal collaborators to create accounts, connect accounts, and follow-ups.
The system also supports collaboration between internal and external stakeholders. For example, a site manager can re-assign the connection request for a specific site/source to an external collaborator like a property manager. This external user will connect using a private landing page and will not have access to your dashboard or data.
Data from each site is collected in a dynamic table, which can be viewed at different aggregated granularity levels. You can filter through data using various properties and create data export lists that are ready-to-use within other software. You can also segregate your data and collaboration by creating different teams.
In this flow, customers can quickly start using a self-serve, turnkey dashboard in an individual-based environment, ideal for identity verifications, employment or income checks, and credit-risk analysis.
You can swiftly create an account, configure your source type, activate products, and personalize a self-hosted landing page with your very own branding and messaging. Once set up, collaborators can create new requests for every end-user who needs to connect accounts. By using multiple teams, you can narrow and control the types of sources available to specific end-users.
Your team will have access to connection status updates to keep track of your end-users' progress, as well as request tags to monitor new, open, and completed requests.
For each new request, end-users will receive an email notification prompting them to connect their account on your behalf. A link will send them to a branded, self-hosted landing page with brief context about the required action, along with the LINK widget. You’ll have the ability to allow one or multiple account connections for an end-user.
Once an account has been successfully connected, the end-user is presented with a success page and can then exit. The internal request owner will be notified and will be able to review the account data in an intuitive dashboard and download a PDF summary.
In this flow, customers can use our self-serve dashboard to manage connection requests and view data, but will also have the ability to choose pre-built integrations with a handful of trusted third-party platforms for carbon accounting, ESG, property management, accounting, payments, and more.
The integration section will include data mapping, data export automation, and export activities tracking.
In this flow, customers will be able to leverage all the functionalities from the self-serve dashboard (Site-Based or Individual-Based) and also pull data from our API. This setup could be useful in a company where, for instance, the sustainability team wants to review data in our dashboard, while the finance team prefers the data pushed via API into their accounting system.
Leveraging a data connectivity partner often drives valuable benefits like removing manual invoice manipulation, keeping end-users within your platform, speeding up processes and accessing authentic and quality data directly. User-credential sharing experiences have become increasingly popular over the past decade and are being used worldwide in very sensitive sectors like open banking.
That being said, User-credential sharing can still impact your conversions if it’s not well implemented or if the value and trust is not convened properly to the end-users. Here are some tricks to maximize conversions:
The end-user cost will be the doubt and risk exposure of sharing their credentials. A way to overcome this to provide context on why your company is proposing this flow and how it will positively impact the outcome. This step can and should be done right before showcasing the Link widget. Here are a few examples per use case:
A great way to emphasize the value furthermore is by sharing the downside of opt-in out from this flow.
Although we’d love to support all your volume, it’s not realistic to expect a perfect conversion rate with data, and we still want our customers to succeed. We encourage customers to add an alternative opt-out flow (even if it’s less streamlined or efficient) to drive conversion with end-users who are not yet ready to share user credentials.
We recommend displaying the call-to-action in a secondary location and clearly stating that this is not the optimal path. This link is usually added at the bottom of the LINK widget.
End-users may drop off for a variety of reasons: they may not have the time, may forget their credentials or MFA details, may not find the sources they need, may not understand the steps, may encounter downgraded sources, or may even be fraudsters turned away by your comprehensive process.
It’s a great practice to use Deck error codes to flag the reasons behind user drop-offs and to build automated flows that reconnect with these users. Providing additional context, alternative options, and another chance to reconnect using LINK can significantly boost re-conversion rates. You’ll be surprised by the results.
For use cases involving sustainability, energy management, and accounting, you can easily trigger reminders for site managers. We also encourage you to coach your team on the value and security this solution offers.
Once an account has been successfully authenticated, Deck will be able to refresh the end-user data (with the proper consent) on a recurring basis without requiring the user to reconnect their account. The refresh process occurs in the background and is triggered either directly by the customer in the self-serve dashboard or via a refresh API endpoint.
Over time, a data source may become disconnected if the end-user changes their login credentials. In such cases, a credential error will be displayed during refresh attempts. In this scenario, the customer will need to prompt the end-user to reconnect their account. This can be initiated within our dashboard's connect section, or if a customer utilizes the Link widget, they will need to support a reconnect flow.
An essential aspect of designing your user credential sharing flow is to consider data latency, which could affect the user experience, especially in scenarios where prompt action or decision-making is critical (under 5 minutes).
This is commonly significant in digital onboarding, lending, and payment use cases. Speed can vary by type and often differs from one source to another depending on the volume of data being accessed. If data latency is a crucial factor for your application, please contact our team for tailored recommendations.
Our ideal world is one where everyday problems are not caused by inaccessibility of data, and we want to do everything in our power to get there as fast as possible.
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