The IBM Security portfolio continued to grow through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Once we acquired new products our teams would begin working on evolving their designs to leverage the design systems and libraries we already had in place within IBM Design. This would enable the growing portfolio of applications to become a larger suite of tools working together, rather than a disparate set of applications without any visual or interactive commonality between them.
AppScan was a an application that scanned your code to determine if there were insecurities that could be breached in an attack. These design sprints ranged from 5-days to 10-days, while this particular design sprint took the one-week to deliver updated guidance to our development partners.
Team
Blake H., Cameron C., Allison H. Yael K.
Problem
Dev team needs a polished visual design of the AppScan Enterprise Monitor (ASM) dashboard. Taking into account new metrics that are being added in the current release and incorporating those updates into the design was a key requirement.
Note: thesw new metrics being added to the dashboard have been, identified, developed, and confirmed thru multiple customer interviews.
- Number of applications with Open Issues
- Need a dashboard for the IT security analyst that will tell him at a glance: what’s the current state of the portfolio or a specific business unit, and how is the application security program progressing overall, or for a given business unit.
- Dashboard should fit on one screen, so that it can easily be included in presentations/marketing collaterals.
- Number of Open Issues
- Ability to see dashboard at the portfolio level or the business unit level
- Trend data for Risk Rating, Testing Status, Apps with Open Issues, Open Issues
Before
There are multiple issues with this current design that are affecting the viewers from accomplishing their tasks without great cognitive load. The team identified these key issues to address with an updated ASM dashboard design:
- No Focus
- No primary/secondary tasks
- Lack of visual hierarchy
- Colors have multiple meanings
- Navigation is not intuitive
- Content is not scannable
- Scale of graphs make them hard to read
- Forced to dig for content
Solution
After
The updated design shows a great sensitivity for the security professional and their need to identify and address information immediately. The key areas of opportunity the updated ASM design addressed were:
- Putting context to the information
- Created visual hierarchy to information
- Provided a task-based journey + flow
- Focus tasks to single graphs
- Reinforced brand positioning
- Works the same, works together, works for me
Development built the air-traffic control tower and the design team provided the means to manage the traffic efficiently and effectively.
Blake H.