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.

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

ABOUT Secure

Secure (the name is made up) 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. 

We conducted rounds of interviews with the leadership, core product team,  and the main customers of the Secure.

These are the patterns we observed:

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?

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: How is Jack using Secure?

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: WHAT TASKS DOES JACK PERFORM DAY TO DAY?

Among many others Jack performs such tasks…

  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

Define: 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

Leveling up the fidelity of the design

We used current Secure branding as guide in high fidelity design - to make sure the application blends with the current suit of applications. We have utilized Material Design as a guide and inspiration.

DESIGN SYSTEM

In this project we quickly understood that Secure is struggling with design and product development for many reasons, one of them being lack of system and thus consistency. We worked on a design system based on the project that we did for them - that captures the new visual language, components and patterns for Secure.

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WHAT WENT WELL WITH THE PROJECT

  1. Core 5 features were designed and implemented by the team, 10+ features were handed off for future development

  2. Working with our strong design team secured buy-in from the leadership on hiring internal designer for  their core team

  3. Secure’s two siloed product teams aligned on the direction and the priorities for a new product vision

WHAT DIDN’T GO SO WELL IN THE PROJECT

  1. Client had growing pains with adapting the design first approach. Towards the end of the project the working process came down to staff augmentation which is a loss of opportunity for our contribution and expertise.

  2. Lost opportunity to collaborate with Secure’s engineers. Which caused implementing the designs not exactly as intended and some solutions weren’t our designs and lacked intended usability. 

  3. Our solutions weren’t tested with actual users.

KEY OUTCOMES

  1. New visual language and desired component behavior captured in the Design system

  2. Simplified and greatly improved user experience in core features: finding devices; creating schedules; camera controls; tagging; staff scheduling

  3. New iconography and data visualization integration

  4. Positive feedback from a few clients that saw v1.0 (however no proper testing were utilized to collect feedback)

THANK YOU.