Rebooting Product Adoption Through Scenario-Based Content Design

At McAfee, I led a redesign of the installation content experience for a new endpoint security product, transforming fragmented, unusable documentation into a scenario-based system that improved usability, increased engagement, and helped drive adoption at scale.

Rebooted product adoption in ~3 months | 92% increase in usability (SUM) | +45% unique pageviews

The Challenge

A newly launched endpoint security product was struggling to gain adoption. While previous versions were installed on over 57 million systems, the new version had fewer than 50,000 installs.

As a result:

  • Customers encountering installation issues often failed to complete setup.

  • Many reverted to older versions, increasing support and maintenance costs.

  • The company set a goal of achieving a 99.95% installation success rate.

The prevailing assumption was a findability problem—that customers couldn’t locate the installation guide.

My Role

I owned the end-to-end content experience for installation and upgrade, including:

  • Content strategy and information architecture.

  • UX writing and task design.

  • Usability validation and optimization.

  • Cross-functional collaboration with writers and support teams.

My Approach

1. Reframed the problem through system-level analysis

Rather than optimizing individual pages, I mapped the full ecosystem:

  • Customer entry points (Google, support site, in-product links).

  • Content assets across guides and support articles.

  • Authoring and maintenance workflows.

This revealed a critical insight: customers were finding the guide—but couldn’t use it.

Map of customer entry points

2. Identified structural issues in the content model

Installation content was:

  • Fragmented across three guides and a support article.

  • Organized around “all-in-one” tasks attempting to cover 20+ scenarios.

  • Difficult to optimize for search or navigate based on user context.

This structure failed both customers (usability) and writers (maintainability).

All scenarios combined into one generic workflow

3. Redesigned the experience around real-world scenarios

I introduced a scenario-based content model:

  • Dedicated, end-to-end workflows for each installation scenario.

  • Optimized landing pages tailored to specific environments.

  • Decision-tree logic to route users to the correct path.

I also defined clear rules for:

  • Where new content should live.

  • How scenarios should be structured and maintained.

Decision tree guiding customers through similar scenarios

End-to-end workflow for each unique scenario

4. Validated the approach through usability testing

I conducted an A/B usability study with 11 participants to compare:

  • Existing “all-in-one” documentation.

  • Scenario-based workflows.

The results confirmed that scenario-based content significantly improved:

  • Task success.

  • Efficiency.

  • User confidence.

Qualitative results

Quantitative results

  • Usability increased from 51.64% to 99.32% for a 92.3% improvement.

    The single usability metric combines task effectiveness, task efficiency, and task satisfaction into a single score.

  • Task effectiveness increased from 52.6% to 93.1%, a 40.5% improvement.

    Task effectiveness is the accuracy and completeness that users were able to complete tasks.

  • Overall relative efficiency increased from 40.4% to 100% for a 59.6% improvement.

    Task efficiency is the resources in relation to the accuracy and completeness that users achieve goals.

  • Task-level satisfaction increased from 67% to 95.5% for a 28.5% improvement.

    Task satisfaction is the comfort and acceptability of use.

  • Observation: Users want ready-made instructions, so that they can install the software and go home.

    Conclusion: Provide detailed steps of the one best way to install the software for a given scenario and only that scenario.

    Implications: Provide detailed step-by-step instructions with visual aids that cover the one best way to complete each scenario.

  • Observation: Users were frustrated that the installation content is spread across many documents and sites.

    Conclusion: Users expect to find all the information they need in one place.

    Implications: Combine installation content into a single deliverable.

  • Observations: Nearly half of the users mistook the workflow topics in the Installation overview chapter for the detailed installation instructions. Once users landed on a workflow topics, they stopping looking despite the fact that the topic lacked the needed details.

    Conclusion: Users look for tasks first before conceptual information.

    Implications: List installation scenario chapters at the top of the guides and group scenarios by type.

  • Observation: Every search string that users entered included at least one of these keywords: product name, version number, or deployment method, but results did not necessarily include the sought after information.

    Conclusion: Users expect us to know not only what they are looking for, but also how they are looking for it.

    Implications: Include search keywords in the titles and short descriptions of installation tasks. For internal searches, combine results from multiple versions into one and show results from the current product version first.

  • Observation: Users were infuriated at the modular setup of the ENS product and reference guides.

    Conclusion: The module-specific guides are confusing to browse and tedious to use.

    Implications: Combine the module-specific guides into individual product-specific guides. Consider combining all operating systems into one document set. Consider updating documents for both version 10.7 and 10.6 and possibly 10.5.

5. Scaled the model across teams

I partnered with writers to:

  • Roll out the new structure across all installation scenarios.

  • Optimize each page for search visibility.

  • Ensure consistency and scalability through shared patterns.

Key Tradeoff

Rather than maintaining a single, comprehensive guide, I shifted to multiple scenario-specific workflows.

This introduced more pages and upfront structuring effort, but dramatically improved:

  • Relevance of content to user context.

  • Search optimization for specific scenarios.

  • Task completion rates.

By prioritizing clarity and usability over consolidation, we created a system that better served both customers and the business.

The Impact

  • Rebooted product adoption within ~3 months.

  • Contributed to achieving the 99.95% installation success goal.

  • Increased usability by 92% (Single Usability Metric).

  • Increased pageviews by 26% and unique pageviews by 45%.

  • Improved search performance, with 39% more keywords ranking in the top 10.

  • Reduced reliance on legacy product versions by improving successful installs.

What This Work Demonstrates

  • Applying UX and content design to solve complex, real-world problems.

  • Translating user context into scalable content structures.

  • Using data and usability testing to validate strategy.

  • Driving measurable business impact through content.

  • Balancing user needs with maintainable systems.