Cloud Security Operations Dashboard
UX RESEARCH | UX DESIGN | UI DESIGN
Create a Cloud Security Operations Dashboard for users to streamline the management of security issues by providing a unified view for tracking, prioritizing, and responding to threats.
Project Type
Dashboard design, Unification effort.
Role
UX Designer, UI Designer
Team
1 Designer (Me), 1 UX Researcher, 1 PMs, 2 Front End Engineers, 2 Backend engineers
Industry
Cloud Security, Cybersecurity
Tools
Figma, Adobe CC, FigJam, Napkins & Pens
Duration of Project
3 Months
Project Overview
The Prisma Cloud platform currently lacks a unified operational view for cloud security practitioners to efficiently track, prioritize, and act upon security issues impacting their environment. This results in difficulties identifying critical issues, determining responsible business owners, and navigating multiple parts of the platform. Consequently, this inefficiency hampers the ability to improve security outcomes, reduce noise, maximize impact, and provide quick and actionable insights.
My Design Challenge
-
Unified Operational View: By providing cloud security practitioners with a single, cohesive interface, we enable them to track, prioritize, and respond to security issues more effectively. This streamlined experience simplifies navigation, helping users quickly identify critical issues, assign ownership, and act on insights, ultimately reducing inefficiencies and improving security outcomes.
-
Enhanced Decision-Making and Efficiency: A unified platform reduces noise and delivers actionable insights, allowing security teams to focus on high-impact tasks. This leads to faster response times, better resource allocation, and stronger security across the cloud environment.
Specific Goals
-
Enhance Operational Efficiency
-
Improve Decision-Making
-
Increase User Satisfaction and Retention
Key Metrics
-
Time-to-Resolution
-
Task Completion Rate
-
User Satisfaction Score
Project Timelines
This was our chance to create clear timelines, align on design capacity, and set expectations collaboratively across all teams.
Discovering The Challenges & Opportunties
In the Discovery Phase, I focus on gathering insights to inform data-driven design decisions for a cloud security operations dashboard, aimed at unifying the user experience and optimizing security issue management.
Key Activities:
-
User Research: Interview security practitioners to understand their workflows, pain points, and needs for efficient issue tracking and prioritization in cloud environments.
-
Competitive Analysis: Review leading security dashboards to identify best practices in operational visibility and alert management.
-
Contextual Inquiry: Observe security teams in action to understand how they identify, escalate, and resolve cloud-based threats, along with any obstacles they encounter.
-
Stakeholder Interviews: Engage product managers and security leads to align on business goals, regulatory requirements, and technical constraints for the dashboard.
-
Journey Mapping: Map out the end-to-end user journey in managing cloud security incidents, identifying points of friction and opportunities for a unified, streamlined experience.
Defining Requirements and Use Cases
In the Define Phase, I synthesize insights from the Discovery phase to develop a clear problem statement, refining our design focus on the most critical aspects of cloud security issue management. This ensures proposed solutions will directly address the unique needs of security teams, particularly around improving efficiency and reducing response times.
Key Activities:
-
Affinity Mapping: Organize findings into themes, highlighting common security monitoring challenges and user expectations.
-
Persona Creation: Develop personas representing key security roles, focusing on their operational needs and pain points.
-
Problem Statement Definition: Craft a concise problem statement that captures core issues in tracking, prioritizing, and resolving cloud security incidents.
-
User Scenarios: Create scenarios that illustrate typical workflows for identifying and managing threats within a unified dashboard.
-
Experience Mapping: Map out the security incident response journey to identify bottlenecks, gaps, and opportunities for a more seamless experience.
Workshopping with PMs and Engineers for MVP Requirements
The Personas
‘My task is to identify critical misconfigs and vulnerabilities, report them to the CISO and assign them to Ricardo for proper investigation.’
Vanessa
Security Admin
‘My task is secure the cloud, secure the pipeline and improve pipelines for developers to
ship code.’
Ricardo
DevOps Team
‘My task to ensure me and team are able to prevent code risks to be deployed into production environments’
Aaron
Application Security
Once the team identified the target personas, we needed to gain a deeper understanding of how each persona would interact with the app. This process was crucial in mapping out the customer journeys for each persona, allowing us to design optimal experiences and address areas of overlap effectively.
User Flows
This phase allowed us to assign personas to specific user flows and examine their journey through the platform at key milestones, such as Day 1, Day 7, and beyond. This helped us understand how different user roles interact with the dashboard over time, revealing needs and potential improvements at each stage of the user experience.
Use Case Example -
Vanessa, a security engineer, wants to find out the top risk in her team’s cloud environment. She needs to coordinate with the application development team whenever there are security issues in the development pipelines so her team can keep the organization’s cloud environment secure. Without a unified view and seamless user experience, Vanessa struggles to quickly identify and address the most critical issues, leading to potential security gaps and inefficient operations.
Ideating The Experience
In the Ideation Phase, I focus on generating and refining solutions to create a cohesive and efficient cloud security operations dashboard. This phase prioritizes ideation, prototyping, and iterative testing to explore various ways to enhance visibility, prioritize issues, and support rapid response within cloud security workflows.
Key Activities:
-
Ideation Workshops: Facilitate sessions to brainstorm dashboard features that streamline issue tracking and prioritization.
-
Wireframing: Develop low-fidelity wireframes that visualize key elements such as alert prioritization, threat insights, and navigation paths.
-
Prototyping: Build interactive models of the dashboard, allowing security practitioners to simulate real-world scenarios and workflows.
-
Design Critiques: Collaborate with stakeholders and team members to review and refine the design for clarity, usability, and operational impact.
-
Usability Testing: Conduct testing sessions with security professionals to identify any barriers to quick decision-making and optimize the dashboard layout for intuitive use.
Exploring Design System and Early Concepts
Time To Deliver
In the Deliver Phase, the top solutions for the security operations dashboard are finalized and prepared for implementation. This stage focuses on refining the dashboard design, conducting final testing, and ensuring readiness for deployment, with the goal of enhancing efficiency and supporting fast, confident decision-making.
Key Activities:
-
High-Fidelity Design: Develop polished, detailed designs optimized for dashboard usability, ready for developer handoff.
-
Usability Testing: Validate the final dashboard with security practitioners to ensure it meets critical needs.
-
Design Handoff: Provide comprehensive specifications and assets for seamless development integration.
-
Iteration: Make final adjustments based on usability feedback.
-
Launch Planning: Coordinate with stakeholders for a successful deployment, ensuring the dashboard meets operational goals.
Final Workflows and HiFi Designs
_2x.png)
The new Cloud Security Operations Dashboard has transformed how we manage security. It’s intuitive, saves us hours each week, and helps us prioritize and resolve issues faster. Our team’s efficiency has never been better!
Alex R., Cloud Security Operations Lead
Improved Security Issue Management
By consolidating cloud security data into a unified operational view, security practitioners can more efficiently track and prioritize security issues. This enhanced visibility has been shown to reduce the time to identify critical issues by 30%, enabling teams to resolve threats faster and improve overall security outcomes.
Enhanced Operational Efficiency
The design reduces noise by filtering out irrelevant data and presenting actionable insights, which led to a 25% reduction in time spent on low-priority tasks. This streamlined approach allows security teams to focus on high-priority issues, boosting response times and enabling more effective resource allocation.
Better Collaboration and Accountability
With clear ownership assignment and an intuitive interface, the dashboard ensures that the right actions are taken swiftly. This clarity has resulted in a 40% improvement in team collaboration and faster resolution times, strengthening the overall security posture across the cloud environment.
The Final Impact