Valtix (Now, part of Cisco)
A multi-cloud network security platform delivered as a service
About the product
Valtix protects applications and services with the first multi-cloud Network Security Platform delivered as a Service and has decoupled the control plane and data plane to deliver simplicity, scale. Valtix network security platform provides network security as-a-service built for the cloud.
Situation
Customers had requested improvements to the solution's viability, policy attaching experience, visibility, and usability. From the user's perspective, completing a task was challenging, and finding and fixing a problem required significant cognitive effort. The dashboard was heavily loaded with widgets, making it difficult to follow a clear story. There were inconsistencies in UI and UX styles, patterns, and components, which resulted in an uncertain navigation situation.
My Role
As a principal designer, my role was to redesign the dashboard and enhance the user experience to meet the expectations of Valtix customers. The objective was to improve the end-to-end user design process, with a specific focus on:
-
Dashboard design and data visualization
-
Creating policy experiences
-
Adding visibility reports and demonstrating the value of the solution to find threats and monitoring
-
Redesigning navigation to create a clear, well structured, less cluttered and intuitive approach
-
Revisiting design system and make some changes and additions.
Action
To begin my work as a UX designer on this project, I first made sure to gain a thorough understanding of the product and its goals. Daily white boarding sessions and meetings with the co-founder, chief architect, and product manager were conducted to prioritize tasks and ensure alignment with objectives.
To deepen my understanding of the solution and customer expectations, I completed two courses on GCP and AWS fundamentals and architecture. I then moved on to planning feature development and redesign using design sprints and the design thinking technique. This allowed us to iterate through the design process, incorporating feedback from actual administrators along the way.
One example of the design improvements made was the use of map visualization concepts to provide administrators with a clear understanding of all available information such as availability zones, regions, threats, and attacks. The interactive map also helped users take appropriate action and understand the benefits of each use case.
My main objective was to simplify the widgets and present data in a clear and understandable manner. Through the use of demo data, the prototypes were created and user feedback was gathered to test and refine the design. Below are prototype-level mock-ups that users can click through to experience the design.
Using a map to present information and enable interaction could improve visibility and help administrators quickly find accounts and resources in multi-cloud network security. To validate the idea, several approaches were created and tested with real users.
Result
Our team developed the "Multi Cloud Security in 5 Minutes" concept, which aimed to provide a seamless onboarding experience for creating an account. We created an interactive dashboard that displayed real-time and useful information to the user upon landing on the dashboard UI.
To better visualize web threats and attacks, we developed an all events page in flow analytics, which displayed WAF, Flow logs, IDS/IPS, and FQDN events in a graph with filtering options for more detailed investigation. Users could view and analyze the data based on all accounts, one specific account, or gateway.
Our goal was to provide a seamless user experience with less cognitive effort required to resolve or observe an issue throughout the flow. This included building a user experience for editing, deleting, or creating new accounts, gateways, Service VPCs, and other services.
To ensure the success of our solution, we conducted product demos and working sessions with existing clients, validating the entire flow and interactions. Our solution provided a powerful and efficient way for users to manage and secure their multi-cloud environments.
Onboarding users and easy setting up their accounts can be a challenging task, but by focusing on creating an automated and intuitive flow, it is possible to streamline the process and reduce the time required for users to get started.
