Dashlane Business: Our 5 Key Principles

Dashlane Business was inspired by a steady and growing chorus of requests: “I love Dashlane—but I wish all my employees could have the simpler, safer web experience I do.”

So we set out to do just that with Dashlane Business 1.0 in 2016.

Taking what we learned from real businesses’ feedback in the past few years, we refined our approach into five key principles that shaped Dashlane Business 2.0. Thanks to our users at businesses large and small, these principles continue to be the north star that helps make Dashlane Business better every day.

Dashlane Business: Our 5 Key Principles

1. Privacy

At all costs, we protect the privacy of the user. A user must feel comfortable putting their most sensitive data and accounts into Dashlane without fear that IT or admins can gain access to that information. No exceptions. 

This first principle can get complicated. The negative effects of a security breach can be extensive and impact many hundreds—if not thousands or even millions—of innocent people. Because of that, businesses often have practices that monitor user activity at work, and it’s widely understood that an employee’s individual business data is not exactly private.

So how do we accommodate administrative needs while still adhering to our principle of privacy?

What’s more, how do we solve for this while also adhering to principles 2 and 3?

2. Security

Do not sacrifice security to save time or cost on a feature. Build security into an easy-to-use interface that is understood by non-technical users to make “most-secure” available to everyone.

3. Trust

A user must trust the system. Trust that it’s private, trust that it’s secure, trust that it’s always available. 

Examples of this in our product are the Smart Spaces™ and Zero-Knowledge Account Recovery features.

Smart Spaces™ was built to create insight for admins without encroaching on end-user privacy. Users partition work and personal account information to keep sensitive data secure, but admins still receive statistical analysis of the user’s passwords, which allows them to address any vulnerabilities without compromising privacy. For example, an admin might know that a user is reusing a weak password across work and personal accounts, but won’t have access to it.

Our complementary feature, Zero-Knowledge Account Recovery, provides a simple but secure solution to a complicated problem: How do you reset a locally stored, secure Master Password without knowing it? By design, our zero-knowledge architecture means we don’t have any way to trigger a traditional password reset, but we recognized the need, and came up with an innovative solution. By using a 3rd party to verify user identity, users can now reset their Master Passwords without compromising the inherent security.

While these three principles make up the foundation of how Dashlane Business functions, we still had to consider improvements in user experience. Ultimately, we know users want to be more secure. They want to protect themselves. But they won’t spend days setting up a new tool or, worse, adding more steps or layers of complexity to their daily tasks.

That’s where principles 4 and 5 come in:

4. Lifestyle Change Before Control

To commit to the necessary lifestyle change, people always need to feel like they are in control and it is their decision. 

5. Immediate Personal Benefit

Provide an immediate, tangible return on time and effort invested that reassures the user that the output will be greater than the input.

These two principles are the impetus for every structural or design change we have and will continue to make on our product with regards to the end-user. You don’t need to be a professional driver to operate the best car; you shouldn’t need to be an IT professional to operate the best password management solution.

We focus our onboarding on providing immediate personal benefit by showing the user how storing your passwords in Dashlane will result in a faster web browser experience. This is the gateway experience. When a user sees how easy it is to browse the web with Dashlane, it encourages them to add more data to Dashlane, like additional passwords and other personal information, further simplifying and securing their digital life and creating a positive feedback loop.

This is the beginning of behavior change—and the beginning of users enjoying the best possible Dashlane experience.

Because once Dashlane has proven itself to be a safe and reliable tool, Dashlane can analyze security behavior and recommend changes that make users—and businesses—safer and more productive.

And ultimately, that’s why we created Dashlane Business.

Dashlane Business brings the simplicity and security of Dashlane to the organizational level.

It’s a solution that accomplishes two goals simultaneously: Enabling employees anywhere to be security-minded without sacrificing efficiency or privacy, and giving admins the control to ensure strong employee passwords to keep their business safe.