THE PROCESS
Understanding current user journey and pain points
In the existing solution for the Secure platform in Bettercloud, users were able to view their assets such as files and folders that were being shared out across their organization. They would identify which ones were a risk, and then execute remediation steps based on their policy. A problem in this existing platform was the amount of actions presented to users to help them remediate these risks.
Users may not know what the right action was to remove the risk, and would often need the guidance from our internal expert team or security to know what they needed to do.
Identify the Critical Actions
I discovered there were 86 total potential actions across 5 applications that users could take.
I found that there was opportunity for some of these actions to be consolidated together so that they became less actions for the user to decide from on the interface, but the back-end would be smart enough to execute the correct action.
I set up a card-sort activity, and worked with our User Researcher to run this with 10 users to see if we could uncover patterns or groupings of these actions to begin consolidating them.
Ideate Collaboratively and Rapidly Test a Solution
Because this was a problem I recognized was large, I decided to hold a design sprint to ideate collaboratively and quickly and craft a solution we could test. I led a design sprint with a cross-functional team, that involved: myself, our design team, product manager, and key customer-facing roles. The design sprint mostly followed the structure of Google Venture’s Design Sprints.
Because discovery step in the overall secure experience was already defined, I now needed to focus on the ‘remediate’ or the securing of risks step in this experience. This helped me to keep the team focused on this specific problem during the sorint.
To align on what the goal for the sprint was, I brainstormed with the team what our goal and challenges will be by facilitating a brainstorming activity.
I then established what the sprint goal and challenges were, and who our target user is.
THE USER
IT/Security Admin concerned about protecting their company's data and enforcing organizational security policies
GOAL
Guide users to quickly remove 100% of risks
CHALLENGES
Is the right action the same for all users?
Can we break out work to be done into digestible chunks while taking bulk action?
Map
I led the team through a mapping activity to outline what the individual steps and tasks the user would take to get to the goal.
The map would help me begin to identify what the user journey looks like. I then led the team through a sketching exercise where each participant got to produce a solution sketch to represent an idea for the prototype.
Storyboard
Using the solution sketches, I then faciliated a storyboarding activity. The storyboard would tell the user's journey frame by frame, and help define the prototype screens.
Prototype
I developed a prototype based on the storyboard we had written. To rapidly develop the designs for each storyboard frame, I faciliated screens that I and each designer would develop. On prototyping day, we continuously reviewed and shared our progress. I built in interactions and flows connecting each frame to develop an end-to-end prototype for testing. I wrote a testing script and outlined each scenario and tasks, and worked with the User Researcher to further refine the script. Our user researcher ran 5 moderated sessions, and I sat in on each session and took notes.
The following are solutions that resulted from our design sprint.
Quick Actions - users can take the correct action to secure their risk
Risk Lifecycle Tabs - users can see how many current risks they have, and how many risks that have successfully remediated
Define Scope
Coming out of our design sprint, I recognized the prototype was a little idealistic. I worked with the Product Manager and architects to align on what was feasible for us to build. We ended up identifying ‘chunks’ (or what later became the epics) that we could iteratively build on to ultimately help us achieve the end-goal we had defined in our design sprint.
We aligned on the scope for the project, decreasing some of the capabilities we had introducing during the design sprint.
Align
We aligned on the scope for the first epic of the project to release. It was important for us as a team to understand what was reasonable for us to build and what our limitations were. With this first release, we focused on building out the remediation actions users could take and making the actions available on the UI. This would help us build the foundation for the experience of presenting ‘suggested actions’ we had designed in our design sprint.
Refine Designs
I refined the designs now that our scope was defined and mapped out the sad-paths and edge cases for the flow.
Sarah Musa
