Cyber Security Service Delivery
Research
UX Design
Service Design
Visual Design
Project Management
2021-2022
Creating a sexy dashboard Transforming an unloved graphical interface for a cyber security appliance into a powerful service delivery tool, identifying cross-product user needs and where to solve them, and creating a culture of user-centric product development. (Ok yes, and making a sexy dashboard.)
Project Summary
What
Our flagship hardware product's graphical interface presented data that powered our service, but was outdated and clunky to use. Asked to create a new dashboard, I explored users' goals, setting off a chain reaction of user-centred initiatives including a completely overhauled GUI.
My role
Solo designer on an agile product development team
Key moment
Receiving an employee award from a slightly baffled executive who wondered how I can ask such insightful questions and deliver such surprising insights without a cyber security background. The answer? Co-creating a complete, shared understanding and creating space for conversation and insights, and always asking "why".
Outcomes
An effective tool to showcase our service to prospects or technical client IT team members
Business goals met: framework updated, new data sources integrated, and critical usability bugs fixed and tested.
Stamp of approval from the analyst team: would make an investigation far easier than the previous product, and was more visually appealing
High approval for visual design from across the company
Created the foundations for a design system and visual language, resulting in my leadership of the platform design system team
Increased awareness of the power of UX, leading to new cross-silo projects, consultations, and blue-sky explorations.
Understanding service delivery and client usecases
I started by seeking to understand who the users were, and what workflows they needed to complete so I could identify requirements for the dashboard. I interviewed various members of the service delivery team, from senior VPs to new junior analysts, observed analysts and our internal IT admin team at work, and worked with client and partner success teams to understand user behaviour and perspectives. Surprisingly, I discovered that most of our assumed user goals were met by other products and systems. Analysts preferred the speed and power of custom-built non-graphical tools, and clients - including our own internal team - used our client-facing portal and sought support from our analyst team. My discovery also showed the complexity of service delivery and analyst life, identifying new pain points that a dashboard would not resolve. These insights were captured in updates to existing personas, a new persona representing an experienced and skeptical client IT security admin, service blueprints, journey maps, scenario maps, and an ecosystem map. These documents helped raise awareness of how the service worked, the daily life of its users, core user goals, and what a future version of the service could include.
Ecosystem Map
Images are blurred for privacy.
Early in discovery, it became clear that there were different perspectives on the way the service truly worked, leading to a gap between the roadmap and user needs. To remedy this, I compiled notes on the various types of data, phases, tools, and services, and created a visualization showing how raw data became a ticket and eventually a mitigation. With each review, we added new tools and gradually we gained clarity about the current state and near future of the service. I was able to raise understanding of the service, give space for stakeholders to address the gap, identify the types of data a dashboard could display, and gain approval to investigate user needs in more depth.
This way of visualizing the service even helped the senior analyst and founding team member who developed much of the service, who declared, "I didn't know it worked like that!"
Analyst journey map
A current-experience journey map showing an analyst's daily role delivering service to a fleet of clients, as well as main points and opportunities. Journey maps were also created for clients, partner clients, and a future journey map showing how the analyst team hoped to work in future. User research documentation like this helped us consider other ways to solve pain points, such as through supporting analysts' non-graphical tools or improving our client-facing product. It also helped us identify requirements for a fleet management product and improved client IT experiences that I later worked on.
Service Blueprint
This service blueprint zooms out to capture how a single cyber security concern moves through the service. It shows a client employee triggering a cyber security alert, our internal analyst team investigating, and a client IT admin resolving the issue and helping the employee get back to work. Explorations like this helped us disprove our user goal assumptions and seek solutions in other products and teams.
Gaining focus and moving goals to where they would be solved
With a list of user goals and workflows, we were able to see what needed to be addressed in other products, where strategic decisions blocked design, and where a new dashboard could realistically help users. By focusing on the reasons someone might need the GUI we gained focus and could define what success looked like. It became clear that a new dashboard was only part of the solution, and that many analyst pain points remained relevant to our remaining user goals.
GUI Problem Statements
How might we give sales engineers a tool that lets them show (not tell) prospective clients the power and quality of the service? How might we give an experienced, cynical client IT Security Admin the evidence needed to trust our team and service?
Balancing user and business goals beyond siloes
I communicated my findings to my technical lead, stakeholders and leadership and sought out a concrete list of requirements. I also encouraged consensus on technical and business goals to ensure we had a specific outcome in mind. The result was a clear list of achievable goals, which included allowing sales and technical clients to explore the product, moving away from an outdated code framework, integrating new data sources, resolving critical usability issues such as responsiveness and navigability, and a visual refresh.
Shifting culture from design feedback to co-creation
Early in the project, I was asked to deliver UX updates at a large product delivery and development meeting, including the CEO/product owner, execs, service delivery - standard practice for UX at the time. In practice, these presentations didn't give suitable opportunities for informed feedback, failed to balance feedback from different teams, and were long and fatiguing for all attendees. This lead to design churn, low stakeholder engagement, and low confidence in next steps.
To remedy this I stepped into a project management role, and created a project working group with key stakeholders. I built a culture of transparency, shared ownership, and co-creation. Our goal became to align on our objectives and unblock each other in order to reach it. Our meetings became much more effective, had higher team morale, and stronger, more user-centred outcomes. Other designers (who also performed the role of project managers) saw the success of this process and followed suit.
Creating an MLP and roadmap
With a clear set of requirements, I began working with analysts to iterate on site maps and wireframes for the dashboard, exploring how a dashboard enables and prompts movement into deeper pages, as well as how analysts jumped across pages during investigations. These iterations led to deep discussions about data types and a substantial shuffle of the site map. I iterated from sketched wireframes to Figma prototypes, and my close collaboration with analysts and our internal IT team allowed me to seek feedback and conduct lightweight usability tests at many stages.
One of the most interesting challenges making inconsistent storage types feel logical and compatible with the fast-paced analyst workflow. To save space, the appliance used both short-term logs and long-term summarized data - a fact that was hard to decipher in the original interface. To perform a complete investigation, users needed to understand and access both formats. My solution was a new hierarchy and layout that showed data from both storage types. This allowed users to search for a specific item in a single page and be certain they would be able to find it.
With the dashboard and most challenging data displays designed, I worked with developers to create re-useable patterns, including a very useful grid with equivalents in the code library and my own design system. This allowed the team to quickly port over many pages without needing hi-fidelity designs, and helped us move quickly from an MLP to a complete replacement for the old GUI.
The new interface focused on enabling the investigative jumps an analyst would take in their non-graphical tools, allowing our sales team to visually demonstrate the power of our service and allowing technical clients to explore the data behind the service.
43:26 shows a limited execution of the appliance. The dashboard has been stripped down even further
Imagining a future for analysts and clients
My cross-silo research, advocacy for the user goals, and ability to raise these to leadership lead to changes across other products and teams. Our internal analyst team was given the green light to focus on their own non-graphical tools, and we shifted to explore opportunities in fleet management, where a consistent graphical tool would be helpful to them. Our client-facing product and client success teams established their responsibility for client pain points and goals, and I consulted on several projects across the company.
The future-state analyst journey map co-created during this project lead to my creation of a concept for an internal fleet management tool, as well as a grassroots product created by and for analysts that immediately resolved certain scaling problems facing the team.
My takeaway
Although being the first UX designer on a highly technical team has its challenges, it's amazing to watch users realize they deserve better tools, and that their experiences matter. I'm most proud of my advocacy for true user needs, helping leadership see that a new dashboard wouldn't fix the biggest problems facing users, and opening the door to solutions that could.