Security Incident Management

Everyday, over 100 of the Fortune 500 companies depend on D3 Security Management System’s award-winning web-based software to document, contain and recover from physical and cyber-attacks.

Role: User Experience and User Interface Designer

A New Landscape

D3 Security Management Systems had primarily been a leveraged for physical security and incident reporting. With the rise of cyberattacks and Internet-of-Things, the company had decided to venture into the industry of cybersecurity. 

As physical and cybersecurity incident documentation shared similar fields, the same documentation, organization and reporting modules were utilized to minimize development costs.

Understanding the User

As conversations with our cybersecurity clients began, it quickly became clear that the primary users are highly technical, security information technology professionals. To support their needs, technical vocabulary and distinct case organization needed to be updated rather than completely reusing the same documentation, organization and reporting modules for physical security.

Updating the Experience

Aggregating the feedback from the user interviews, a user journey map was created. I quickly identified that the information architecture of the interface critically impacted the response times of the user. Since response time is vital to protect against threats, this prompted a requirement to update the presentation layer of the software so that cybersecurity professionals can consume information quickly and react accordingly.

The Result

Instead of loading a new window every time a new report was created, the software was updated into a split frame dashboard. This allowed users to quickly create and review multiple incidents and tasks. A decrease of accidental reporting creations also occurred when the key area used to create incident reports and tasks was updated to follow standard accessibility guidelines. Case hierarchy and reporting fields were updated to follow the mental model and language of the security professionals. 

As a result, time on task was reduced by 2 seconds through updating information hierarchy and language familiarity.

What would I have done Differently?

Given that there was more time, I would’ve improved the overall accessibility of each module within D3’s software. Through making accessibility improvements like increasing font size and colour contrast, I foresee an overall improvement in ease of use and additional decrease of time on task.