Cloud Security Onboarding
Assessing Cloud security Threats
As the Lead Product Designer, I guided the user-centered design of an improved onboarding flow and simplified dashboards of a cybersecurity product, so clients could view their outstanding threats and compliance reports easily.
Problem Statement
Designing an effective onboarding process and dashboard for a cybersecurity company posed the challenge of simplifying a complex, infrastructure-specific platform while reducing user abandonment and improving product understanding. We needed to address the overwhelming feeling experienced by users upon initial interaction with the dashboard.
TEAM COMPOSITION
2 Product Owners
2 Product Designer/2 Service Designers
3+ Software Engineers
My Impact
Designed enhanced onboarding flow for simplicity
Worked in an Agile setting to incorporate feedback
Led team of designers to provide deliverables to client
Diving into the Cybersecurity Domain
The team I was on met with a cybersecurity client who was interested in improving their platform by guiding users through an onboarding flow to increase product understanding and reduce abandonment. The product involved adding connectors from external infrastructure sources, scanning the infrastructure for vulnerabilities, and viewing the results. To make any valuable changes to the product, we needed the right team. Assembling a group of skilled service designers, each with a unique set of perspectives, supported our process of delineating user and competitor research, creating low-fidelity wireframes of improved flows and dashboards, and eventual design of interactive flows, in which we walked stakeholders through our findings.
End-to-end Design
I was able to work across the spectrum of design, from leaning into research to working with cross-functional teams, and leveraging design methodologies to create a better login flow for cybersecurity.
We conducted a competitive analysis that extended beyond the cybersecurity sector. We explored what leading companies were doing in terms of onboarding and data-visualization dashboards, and took inspiration from innovative approaches. This approach allowed us to draw from a spectrum of ideas to create a unique and user-centric onboarding process. Through documentation, we garnered the necessary background to understand the company's processes and identify areas for improvement.
User experience should be seamless; deep-diving into a product’s full feature set should be an optional task, not an imperative one. In our exploration of the company and its offerings, we found that users were easily overwhelmed by first impressions of the dashboard that featured many data-visualization services for threat and security monitoring. By moving the initial setup back to a dedicated flow (for inexperienced or first-time users) our goal was to reduce attrition and promote retention.
Improving User Retention
When users were introduced to the suite of offerings that the company showcased on the platform, they became overwhelmed. This was evidenced from our ongoing meetings with stakeholders, and from analytics that determined users were not coming back to the platform after signup. Users who represented various personas, from engineers to executives, would take the time to set up an account and connect to their infrastructure for a scan, but swiftly ditch the product because they didn’t see the value in committing to understanding the platform as a whole. We knew that the issue lay in setting up a new account, and in viewing the dashboard for the first time.
Lesson Learned
Having a better sense of the quantitative metrics surrounding user retention and bounce rate would provide us with a clear picture of what users wanted from the platform; we only had access to anecdotal data.
We aimed to reduce overwhelming feeling by promoting a conversational workflow, so users could get set up easily and get a sense of the value-add, before diving into the nuances of the dashboard. By breaking up the steps into meaningful and simple tasks, the user could easily follow along with the UX copy to ensure they were taking the correct steps. We wanted to take a step back from immediately shoving users into a dashboard with many services and features, and provide them with the opportunity to see results from a threat scan; we also wanted to highlight the importance of scanning and the types of insights one would gather. Driving home the value to the engineer and to the high-level executive, alike, was a consideration.
Differentiating the user types, we found that engineers want low-level feature sets that allow them to tinker or configure their scans in various ways. Executives were less interested in the act of scanning and more concerned with organization-wide cybersecurity practices; how does our infrastructure stack up and where are the vulnerabilities? Noticing the difference allowed us to focus on different paths and views to ensure we were designing relative to audience needs.
We explored a simplified view that incorporated the typical compliance scans that an engineer might run once they had access to the full dashboard. By surfacing these scans earlier in the flow, a user could see the details and value of what the product had to offer. Of course, this view could get more complicated by adding multiple scans and a host of infrastructure; to combat this, we considered how to better group scans and allow a user to search across scan types. We considered how a user may navigate in and out of this secondary step.
Ideation to Reality via Hi-Fi
Stakeholder Collaboration
Collaboration and delineation are important aspects of a successful product launch or feature reveal. When the domain is complex and the client requests are numerous, the design team needs to be in sync with engineering.
Beginning with a low-fidelity iteration of the onboarding and dashboard flow, we created a framework that served as the iterative backbone of our vision. This helped us identify potential issues and make necessary adjustments before moving forward with pixel-perfect design. I wanted to emphasize getting the interactions and flows right, which relied on us interviewing the stakeholders for their feedback on the implementation, relative to the needs of the users. Due to the condensed timeline of the project, we did not have the luxury of interviewing users and had to rely on data that was passed to us.
We adopted a collaborative approach, where our team was split across aspects of onboarding and the topology-driven dashboard; with an emphasis on service design, the team was able to consider the technical use cases of this tooling and call back to our research on cybersecurity to design relevant flows. Delivering these designs for stakeholder review became a part of our daily stand-ups, ensuring that our work aligned with the project's objectives. The iterative nature of our design process allowed us to incorporate feedback and implement changes swiftly. This exchange with stakeholders led to a refined and optimized onboarding flow that was more functional than their existing product.
Once the engineer completed their scans, they should be able to view the results – depending on how long the scans took to complete. We opted for a simple view as a part of the onboarding flow, where a user could easily see which scans were problematic via alarms. From there, it was up to the user to continue to the dashboard to look at ways to remedy the alarms and shore up their infrastructure’s cybersecurity.
Key Takeaways from the Project
Our commitment to understanding the complex domain, from stakeholder meetings to becoming subject-matter experts, was well worth it in terms of learning. The team embodied an empathetic approach to designing flows that felt natural to software engineers; we were happy with the way we broke out the flow and allowed breathing room before a user had to leverage the dashboard. Our high-touch approach, user and competitor research, and user-centric flows were delivered to the team upon project end.
Outcomes and Results
Our user-centric design approach, deep domain understanding, and innovative solutions led to a conversational workflow that aimed to reduce user attrition, especially among engineers and executives. By surfacing compliance scans earlier in the onboarding process and providing simplified views we aligned on enhancing overall user retention and promoting a more functional product.
Disclaimer: Work shown was created while employed at Nearby Creative, delivered on behalf of an agency partner, and displayed with permission. Header image from Unsplash.
