B2B / Nov 2021 to Mar 2022 — Note: this project is anonymized to respect the client’s NDA
This IT Security company helps organizations detect security threats and stay compliant with critical policy frameworks (PCI, HIPPA, etc.). As lead designer, I was responsible for co-facilitating user interviews, developing persona artifacts to capture our findings, identifying the product’s UX vision and high-level organization, driving conceptual ideation, creating high-resolution designs and documentation, and conducting QA.
Research
After conducting interviews with stakeholders and end-users, we identified one main target persona that we split into two slightly different subtypes: the IT Admin and the Security and Compliance Management (SCM) Admin.
Both shared key characteristics:
they were more analytical than intuitive people
they felt strong negative emotions when confronting unexpected situations (dread, worry)
and found great pride in their ability to resolve issues and stay on top of a complex technical environment.
I led the synthesis of these findings and identified several key challenge themes:
users weren’t able to resolve issues efficiently
they weren’t able to navigate the product with confidence
and the product didn’t enable the collaboration necessary for them to accomplish their goals.
Ideation and definition
During this phase, we focused on allowing users to navigate the application more efficiently and confidently. Due to the client’s timing and budget constraints, after suggesting high-level concepts to address all the challenge themes mentioned above, we focused our effort on creating a landing page that would surface the most critical information and workflows.
Takeaways
TAKEAWAY 1
For years, prescriptive and detailed requests from end-users drove the client’s strategy. As a result, their stakeholders and SMEs struggled to zoom out and imagine alternate approaches to their customers' underlying issues. Synthesizing the end-users' many pain points into actionable, user-centric themes allowed us and our client to ideate at a higher level and get out of the weeds.
TAKEAWAY 2
IT Security and Compliance is a very dense subject, and discussions with the client’s team could get very technical. During the interviews, fairly experienced end-users reported having a limited understanding of some important aspects in that field (acronyms, concepts). This level of complexity can hinder progress when you come in as a consultant. We had to help our client get into the right level of detail to identify challenges and opportunities without getting bogged down into details that didn’t help us help the client. Taking the time to highlight the value of high-level thinking was hard at first, but paid off.