LevelBlue Cybersecurity
Leading great experiences in Cybersecurity.
Overview
As Head of UX, I led a multi-disciplined team of designers while staying hands-on. Our focus was modernizing the flagship SIEM application and building a SaaS platform that integrated the cybersecurity product suite into one unified, contextual experience.
We ran a scaled user research program that matched risk with effort and time, which let us find problems, validate solutions and ship efficiently. Along the way we improved the information architecture and taxonomy, implemented and maintained a new design system, improved core user workflows, and designed 0-to-1 features for analysts and customers, including SideKick, a global AI assistant.
I grew the team from two to six designers — fostering a culture of collaboration, autonomy, and innovation. I led adoption of AI tooling in our processes and taught the team to work with agents while keeping token costs within budget. I also introduced agile project management to the design team, a company first, aligning design with product and engineering roadmaps.
Notable Results:
- Designed SideKick, a 0-to-1 global AI assistant that cut analyst time on task by 50% for queries
- Achieved 90% adoption of SideKick among analysts running queries in the platform
- Reduced support tickets by 30% by replacing inconsistent components and one-off flows with a unified design system
Analysis
Research with security teams and customers highlighted unaddressed feature requests and unseen improvements for our products. Strategic interactions with product, sales and support placed design improvements on company roadmaps. Close collaboration with engineering fostered a transparent understanding of technical limitations and a productive rapport to reduce tech debt and prioritize UX in product development.
Solutions
After considering user feedback, through surveys, interviews and contextual inquires, product requirements, and technical limitations — I created a path for the team to achieve a list of UX outcomes. Basing the outcomes on improving the experiences for operations teams and customers, some of the highest priority outcomes were:
- Reducing analysts' time on task
- Reduced cognitive load during threat queries, identification and mitigation
- Increasing velocity for investigation and reporting workflows
- Improving team shift handoffs
- Providing inclusive internal communications
- Making dashboards more intuitive to create and read
Major features like an AI assistant, a design system shift to Material Design, inclusive team messaging, SOAR and generative AI tools for investigations and incident reports were features identified to improve UX metrics.
AI Assistance
Leveraging an LLM and a UI agent, we were able to provide value for analysts throughout their day-to-day workflow. From a powerful natural language search and filter assistant, to a generative reporting tool, and customizable role creations — users were delighted to decrease the time of usual tasks by more than half.
View the Search Assistant Case Study
Modernizing the Design System and UX Behaviors
The main platform when I came onboard used an older UI framework from Bootstrap. After negotiating with engineering, all teams agreed to implement Material UI for Angular. The design system update improved the aesthetics and added useful components with more robust interactions for users. It also kept UX patterns consistent across a suite of products. An updated data visualization library also improved readability for analysts and customers.
Inclusive team messaging
Communication within operations teams is paramount. At first — analysts, managers and customers relied on peripheral applications to communicate to each other. To reduce extraneous cognitive load, we designed an inclusive messaging and notification center in the platform. This also improved team shift handoffs. Users could tag individuals or teams in notes to raise concerns, get guidance for and delegate alarms, events or investigations.
Implementing SOAR
From concept to implementation, I guided the design work for SOAR technologies into the platform with product and engineering. We worked with subject matter experts and operations teams to solve complex requirements such as action automations, rule association and plugin actions. The implemented design utilized a linear playbook interface that broke each step into a card that users could easily customize and add to the automation.
UX Outcomes and Increased Design Maturity
The team achieved 10 major UX outcomes across a suite of products. We created strong confidence in the UX team by showing the ROI of user research and testing. We evangelized user-centered design thinking and negotiated for best design decisions while meeting business requirements. Through our efforts, we increased design maturity within the company.