How can security teams document and collect information for their intel efforts?
The Challenge
Intelligence teams are constantly hard at work protecting their companies from internal and external threats - for example phishing tactics or other cyber security attacks. They need a platform that allow them to measure their effectiveness, both internally and to leadership.
The ability to quantify efforts helps to justify budget and also shows the capabiltiies and accomplishments of their work. Current tools are confusing, not user friendly, and outdated.
One Platform to Rule Them All
We created a digital B2B platform to not only help intel professionals keep track of information protecting teams from threats, but to save them from something far scarier than phishing scams, randsomware, and data breaches... disorganized project managmenet.
Inventories to keep intel requirements, sources, stakeholders, and tickets organized and easy to find
Dashboard view so managers can oversee the progress of their team working through different tickets, making it easier to help teammates strugglng with certain assignments
Users can add a new requirement, source, stakeholder profile at any time with a global create button
Each detail page can be broken down into categories to see all the linked information, making it easier for users to find everything they need for every assignment
Behind the Curtain | What We Did
Leveraging User Research
When I joined the project, the core user research and product audit had already been conducted. My team had conducted interviews with Directors of Threat Intelligence, Team leads, Senior Analysts, Analysts, and Business Analysts. The following user research pieces were conducted by my teammates.
Questions for Intelligence Team Users
- Are there people on your team that use WorkINT? What are their roles and responsibilities?
- What other tools have you used that are similar to WorkINT?
- How has the way you use the tool changed since you first started?
- Can you tell us about other tools you use in the intelligence space.
Key Takeaways about Current Solution
- The current tool, WorkINT is the only tool on the market that allows mapping of requirement to work tickets. As the standalone tool, it becomes default for workflows, yet is not user friendly. That results in several features going unused since users didn't notice them or did not know how to utilize them
Heuristic Audit
My team conducted a heuristic analysis of the current tool to find opportunities.
1. Issue: Most users skip the Dashboard and go straight to the Ticket Summary page.
Why does this matter? Disorients new users. Seasoned users lose time finding the most relevant features.
Recommendation: Make Ticket Summary the focus of the Dashboard, and divide Dashboard into quadrants instead of long rows. Vary the formatting of the sections so the page doesn’t look repetitive.
2. Issue: Users complain about being forced to always log back in after a short interval.
Why does this matter? It interrupts their workflow and causes frustration.
Recommendation: Allow users to customize the timeout duration.
Using an Object-Oriented Approach to Understand Requirements
Using the OOUX (Object Oriented UX) Approach, I placed each core object at the forefront of the system. This process is a form of breaking down complexity to understand how everything is connected, the purposes each item serves, and how it ties to the business requirements.
Entity Mapping to Demonstrate Relationships
My colleague created this chart so we could see the relationships between core components. The key indicates quantity of exchange. So for example, each Requirement might be linked to multiple Tickets - one:many.
Designing out Workflows for Users to Log and Track their Tickets and Corresponding Requirements
I went through several rounds of wireframes to experiment with the usability of the platform.
Using the ANT design system, we made higher fidelity wireframes to show all the detail and inventory pages.
Collecting Usability Feedback for Ticket and Requirement Functionality
I conducted user testing sessions to get direct feedback on the wireframes.
Test Objectives:
- Evaluate the ticketing and task functionality of the platform
- Ensure that users can navigate the interface
- Find gaps in functionality
- Ensure language is clear
Keeper of Order and Consistency
I built out the entire design system. The UI designer created concepts of what they wanted, and I transformed them into organized components, created properly with instances and auto-layout. I was the most proficient with the new updates and complexities of Figma, so I became the default component builder, to ensure everything was built in an optimal way.
Final Design
Giving developers clarity on functionality and states
Results
Users could easily track their case load and see all the corresponding requirements in under 2 clicks. The revamped platform also connects all aspects of a project together so users don't need to go to several pages to find the information they need.