Designing, building, and integrating a new feature in Avast Online Security & Privacy.
Building on the successful Avast Online Security & Privacy redesign, our team developed a new feature for the company's flagship browser extension. This allowed us to expand the initial offering and pave a smoother path towards transitioning to the paid model as well as an integration with the Avast One suite.
A compact cross-functional team carried Cookie Manager from product framing through design, research, implementation, and release.
The acquired product
In 2021, Avast purchased a popular browser extension called "I Don't Care About Cookies" created by Croatian developer Daniel Kladnik. The product already had clear demand: it removed cookie consent prompts and let people browse with fewer interruptions, which was especially relevant in GDPR-heavy markets.
Why it was paused
The intention was to embed that capability into one of Avast's privacy products, initially Avast AntiTrack. But as a paid tool, it was not the right environment to unlock broad user value from the acquisition. Amid larger internal shifts at Avast, the purchased extension was temporarily shelved.
Why AOSP became the fit
That changed with the revival of Avast Online Security & Privacy by the end of 2021. AOSP had quickly become one of the company's top products and was the first place where this acquisition could strengthen the core value proposition instead of feeling bolted on.
My role
Turning the acquisition into a product feature
As the designer on Avast Online Security & Privacy, I led the work of shaping that acquisition into a coherent feature within the product.
Flow
Help people get cookie banners out of the way instead of repeatedly breaking their flow.
Complexity
Address multi-option consent flows that the original extension did not fully resolve.
Integration
Integrate the new feature into the recently redesigned framework so it felt native in both UX and visual language.
Business justification was already in place by the time design began, so there was no need for a classic discovery phase. Our first task was to decide where this new capability should live inside the product. The original extension barely had an interface, so we were effectively starting from scratch while reusing parts of its backend.
Next steps
From the first drafts to the user testing
I produced wireframes covering all key ideas and requirements. We went through a few rounds of internal feedback, and then I moved on to produce hi-fi visuals to run the first external user test.
After running the high-fidelity screens by the team and receiving sign-off from our project owner, I created a prototype in Figma, emulating the flow from installing the extension to discovering and using the Cookie Manager feature.
To prepare for the user interviews, we sourced questions from all stakeholders and key team members. The user interviews were conducted by my colleagues Natalie and Veronika. I joined one of the early calls to see if we were on the right track with gathering useful information. They also did a great job of putting together an extensive summary of the findings. Still, I watched all the recordings later by myself to note the specific observations I was looking for.
The results were strong and, in some respects, eye-opening. It was one of the most useful pieces of qualitative user research I had in a while, because of the number of important insights that people shared with us. As often happens, some of our previous assumptions did not hold up, and some performed really well.
For example, initially we adopted a tooltip system from Avast One, where people would hover over a question mark icon and read a short helper text. This interaction pattern has existed since the earliest visual operating systems, so it seemed obvious for the user. In reality, only two people out of ten found it, and only one of them cared to read the text. Even that person struggled to understand the intended message.
Overall, the feature was well received, and there were only moderate to minor usability issues. We presented the findings summary to the team for discussion and prioritization.
Next, I set out to structure, verify, and implement the feedback we had agreed to address.
As a result of this research, we reimagined how we presented complex cookie popups and the options provided to the user. Ideally, a second round of qualitative research would have followed, but given the tight timeline, we decided to proceed with the release, gather quantitative data, and revisit the feature in a second phase.
We had a dedicated team of engineers assigned to the project, so our collaboration started as soon as the project kicked off. Working together, we were building the feature iteratively and on schedule, quickly resolving any issues as they emerged. I was pleased with how faithfully the frontend implementation matched the design.
The OKRs were well-defined: shipping on schedule, improving adoption after release, measuring sales impact from cross-promotional campaigns, increasing NPS results by a set amount, and a few others.
We successfully shipped Cookie Manager and launched it alongside a marketing campaign. This marked an important milestone in the AOSP product roadmap. Over the next few months, adoption and engagement rates for Cookie Manager exceeded our expectations.
This was a perfect example of end-to-end regular design work in a corporate environment, excluding the discovery phase. It might seem routine on the surface, but these projects are always unique and present their own challenges. In this particular instance, I really liked how user research reshaped our design decisions and significantly affected the complexity of information presented to users.
Within a single project I had a chance to come up with a new information architecture, create raw concepts, craft prototypes, validate our ideas through feedback sessions and research, build high-fidelity UI, ship to developers, and work with them to oversee the implementation. It really had it all.
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