Agent Installation and Management
D3 Security | Building a new feature along with its installation wizard.
Project Overview
This project was to design a new feature that needed an easy to understand UI, as well as a logical installation wizard, specifically for proxy agents. The project itself had a timeline of 3 weeks for everything, including initial discussions, design, development and testing. For the design aspect, I had about 4 days to hash out a full solution to pass onto development.
My Tasks:
User Research & Analysis
Wire-framing
Prototyping
UX Flow Analysis
Tools Used:
Pen & paper
Figma
Background Info
The Cybersecurity industry is relentlessly fast-paced. Competitive advantages cannot be held for long if features are not constantly being improved and built. One such feature that needed to be built immediately was an agent installation process, as well as an interface to manage the installed agents within our SOAR (Security Operations, Automations and Response) platform.
Unlike working e-commerce, designing enterprise-level applications requires a lot of technical knowledge. Particularly with Cybersecurity, there is a plethora of technological details and security protocols to understand in order for designs to make sense to Cyber Engineers, Analysts and other such users. At the beginning of this project, I had very minimal understanding of proxy agents and how to configure them. I was tasked with designing not only the interface the manage agents, but also the process of how to install and configure them. I consulted various team members, developers, engineers to expand my knowledge and have a better grasp of proxy agents.
Quick Brainstorming
Given the timeline, even though this was a new feature, scope was something that was heavily considered throughout the entire process. The initial discussions focused on a management interface that allowed users to configure their agents within the application. However, due to scope on the development side, the scope was quickly reduced to only allowing users to monitor agents.
The design needed not only to be easy to use, but also extremely easy to develop.
My initial sketches included brainstorming the user flow of the installation process as well as potential UI options.
Designing the Installation Process
This project entailed not only designing a UI for the agent management, but also to logically map out a UX flow for the installation process from beginning to end.
In this case, after discussions with the development team, I was able to understand the technical requirements of agent installation and propose a more holistic solution.
Design and Iterate.
The initial designs also included more user interaction, such as the ability to configure their agents directly within the application. However, due to resource limitations, the management interface became a place to monitor agents. Because the management page now focused less on configuration and more on the monitoring, the agent information needed to be readily available and easy to digest.
I ended up opting for a two-panel framework for the following reasons:
This framework allows for information to be progressively shown. The user can see basic details at the highest level and open more granular details if they desired.
This framework allows the possibility for configuration in the future. Even though the configuration aspect was out of scope for the time being, it does not mean we won’t be building this functionality in the future. This framework is more future proof in that sense and can be adapted easily.
This framework is part of an existing module within the application. The two-panel concept is used in other parts of the application, which means there is code that can be easily re-used. In this sense, it was extremely easy to develop this new management interface.