WIREFRAMES/PROTOTYPES

BRINGING THE DESIGN TO LIFE

After feeling confident that we are doing the right thing, my next goal was to make a prototype showing the minimum viable product (MVP) to further get feedback from customers.

Each prototypes were phase delivered as milestones: 1, 2, and 3 and that would further be broken out into sprints. The schedules for the Milestones were 1.5 months each to release and were used subsequently to call customers and get feedback.

The main goals for me at the prototyping stage were to add more details to the high level screen flows validated in the storyboards, to specify interaction behaviors and animations, blank and error states, and resolving edge cases that the engineers came up with. Whew...

PROTOTYPES (MILESTONE 1 + 2 + 3)

1. Active Threat Defense
   
2. Filters for Review
3. Central Performance Management (CPM)

Milestone 1 prototype for Policy Workflow (PWF) showing the main flows.

Milestone 2 prototype for Filters for Review, continuing where I had left off previously, and creating new mobile dashboard flows.

Milestone 3 prototype for Filters for Review, detailing Bulk Actions, and Context panel.

ACTIVE THREAT DEFENSE

Problem: Customers found it difficult to know which filters to review when they are released weekly

Currently, the first thing most customers do when filters are released weekly is to read the release notes in an email to learn more about the new/modified filters.

Solution: Enhance the dashboard after users logged in and show the Filters for Review widgets grouped into categories such as Active Malware Threats, New/Modified Filters, Performance Incidents, and Vulnerable Scans

After logging into the SMS web console, customers will immediately see the Active Threat Protection Advisor (now renamed to Filters for Review widgets) at the dashboard. This is the starting place to defend against the latest vulnerabilites and threats.

The widgets pull the latest threat data from Trend Micro's Smart Protection Network (SPN) ‐ data provided by the Global Research located all over the world.

Now, customers immediately get visibility into the latest threats and know where to start in their filters tuning without relying on their emails.

FILTERS FOR REVIEW

Problem: Customers were taking too many steps to review a filter and wanted a more efficient way to review filters

Customers had to navigate to different pages in the SMS Java console to search for filters, to get information, and used various workarounds due to the limitation in the current Java console design.

Solution: Assist customers with an automated workflow

After clicking into a Filters for Review widget,user sees the Filters for Review page (showing filters flagged for Active Malware Threats, for example).

The filters for review page displays a beautiful card UI that is expanded, showing enriched information to assist users to tune filters

A Context pane on the right side lets user explore the filter as it relates to Profiles, Events, Performance, and Timeline.

Now, the entire workflow is optimized for ease of use without jumping from place to place within the UI.

Solution: Provide a Timeline feature to help customer see changes made to the filter, thus avoiding workaround tools like spreadsheet or email

Once filters are reviewed, different team members – whether on the Security Operations (DevOps) team or the Network Operations (NetOps) team – have visibility on the changes to the filters.

Now all team members, which were previously siloed, can quickly see an audit trail of the filters tuning work.

Filters for Review – filters tuning workflow

DESIGN DETAILS

DEEP DIVE INTO CENTRAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Probably the most challenging aspect of the Policy Workflow was designing Central Performance Management, difficult because early on we didn't have detail requirements.

At minimum, our objective was to show more statistic that the devices were gathering in disparate system logs and displaying that on the web console in beautiful charts. For normal users to grok.

I worked with our Technical Assistance Center group, read many architectural documentations, had many meetings with the Core Engines team, and read our customer support forum to glean comments from our users.

Most had mentioned arcane command line interface (CLI) commands that when entered would give statistics for filters:

show-np-rule-stats, show np-tier-stats, debug-np-congestionx

I called these the "Inside Baseball" CLI commands because only a few advanced users knew about these. Bare in mind that these commands were created by the Engines team primarily for debugging purposes, rather than for general user consumption. They weren't well documented and changed whenever a new device with new architecture was released.

METRICS AND DATA VISUALIZATION

CENTRAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WITH PERFORMANCE INSIGHT

Problem: There are a lot of metrics out there around filter performance

As stated above the statistics around filter performances are used primarily by advanced users to determine how to tune their filters based on performance.

Solution: Distill everything down into a format which can be easily digested by novice users

Give user the data necessary to maximize their security effectiveness, to disable filters that may have minimal security impact but severe performance impact.

Combining all these data point from the different teams, I started to create high level wireframes to show the possibility of the metrics each IPS device collects.

At a high level, at the Performance Insight, users can see top filters based on performance for all devices.

Clicking into one specific filter takes the user to the Filters for Review page Context for performance. Now user can get performance data for any filters on any devices (which were previously obtainable from the CLI command) shown as rich data visualization charts.

The team also came up with an algorithm called the Performance Correlation Index (CPI) to determine a filter's correlation with congestion.

Users can now say goodbye to learning CLI commands and find beautiful beautiful looking performance metrics/statisticscharts in the UI.

Introducing the New Policy Experience

The above gallery shows the final designs of TippingPoint SMS user experience.

Vimeo showing a simplified workflow and a more refined user experience..