Secure: Security Software Redesign

 My Role: Research, Workshop Facilitation, Synthesis, Audit, Design.

Design tools: Figma & Whimsical.

Duration: 8 months.

Team: 4 designers, 1 project manager, vast team of engineers.

ABOUT Secure

Secure (not a real name) is a Fortune 500 company (but the company is real) in Security and Maintenance Sector. They operate globally and have been one of the major leaders in this space. Secure has a huge value offering for it’s clients, but is currently losing ground to new competitors. 

Secure has an old legacy software, that is a foundation to a few products combined under one umbrella, that has been frankensteined for over a decade: new features were smashed on top of each other; all requests from customers were added; errors and confusion had a band aid fix, that temporarily fixed one issue while simultaneously created another. 

Secure’s engineering driven strategy led to a very complex, hard to use product. 

Project overview

Problem: 80% of Secure customers use 20 % of their features. Mainly because there are a lot of features, nested within one another, hidden from users and not easy to learn.

Why is it important: Secure is a fortune 500 company in security and surveillance sector, with big value proposition, but losing customers to new competitors. Because new products offer simple design, clarity and ease of training for new hires, ease of maintenance and perceived higher quality.

Solution: Our team has designed a 2 full day workshop to unpack the most valuable, high impact features to include in the redesign of the legacy software. We preserved the branding of Secure but designed a new look and feel following the Material Design Guidlines. We interviewed their customers to confirm the most valuable features and to learn more about their use cases. The MVP software included: custom search and filtering; tagging; creation and assigning of events; camera controls; staff management

Design process

Discover: Interviews

We wanted to understand what is the main problem from different groups to gather their perspectives. We conducted rounds of interviews with the leadership, core product team,  and the main customers of the Secure.

These are the patterns we observed:

1. In spite of offering every imaginable and useful feature, Secure would be losing to new competitors, that offering a lot less to their customers, but doing a great job at those few things

2. Only 20 % of features are used by Secure’s customers. 

3. Users are not aware of the 80% of features of Secure’s surveillance product.

4. Secure internal teams work in silos and are not aware of issues, and priorities of other teams. There is no alignment on the top priorities and direction within the management at Secure. 

5. Engineering driven decisions created extremely cumbersome workflows. 

6. 3rd party integrations are causing errors and crashes in software.

Discover: Synthesis

We synthesized those patterns and visualized them in Mural.

Discovery workshop

We gathered two main teams, servicing two core products that Secure is offering for two full days of workshops.

Activities that helped us distill vague requests into prioritized plan: 

1. Build Empathy Map Canvas

2. Co-create Persona and User Stories

3. Create Future State User Journey

4. Map the features

5. Prioritize V1 and V2 features

DEFINE: WHAT ARE THE MAIN USER GROUPS?

Who will be using the product?

There are 4 main user groups for this product:

1. Security Systems Manager

2. Security Officer

3. Receptionist/SOC Operator

4. Security Guard in SOC 👉

DEFINE: JOURNEY MAP

What Journey does Jack go through while using the product?

1. What does he do?

2. What does he feel at each step of the journey?

3. What are some of his daily tasks?

4. What does he think when he performs those tasks?

5. What are his pain points?

6. How Might We address them?

DEFINE: FEATURES PRIORITIZATION

What features bring the most value to Jack?

What security functions of the software are essential for Jack to perform his duties?
Features were prioritized in the 2 day workshop.

1. Live monitoring with smart detection

2. Intelligent alert systems that bring people’s attention to the most urgent situations

3. Ability to assign clearances in custom efficient ways that work for different needs within his company

DEFINE: User Flow

What tasks does Jack perform day to day?

1. Search for camera to assess emergency situations

2. Create and save a new layout

3. Prepare and send incident reports 

4. Restrict access

5. Add a new camera to the layout

6. Add new camera from saved views

What are Jack’s pain points?

The points highlighted are the ones we are going to look at in this case study. 

1. Too many cameras to monitor at the same time

2. Hard to notice urgent notifications in the stream of live data

3. No feedback on the loss of video

4. Hard to locate device or a person quickly

5. Cumbersome Reporting

Design: How might we resolve these pain points?

1. Device finder that is essentially a filter:

   • Omnipresent as an expendable floater on every screen

   • Updates results dynamically

   • Structures search options to narrow down search results

   • Allows to save presets for common searches

2. Out of the box reporting templates

3. Ability to save report to dashboard

4. Ability to re-run last top 5 reports

5. Intuitive data visualization

Design: Exploring potential solutions

I have started in low fidelity utilizing Figma UI kit

Leveling up the fidelity of the design