Pulsedive Website Redesign

Cyber Security Reimagined

Project Goal: To streamline a cyber-security platform for users that pride themselves on mastering hard-to-use interfaces… sounds easy enough, right?

About the Project:

Pulsedive is an open-source threat intelligence (OSINT) platform that provides cyber-security professionals contextual information on a suspicious piece of data that they can search through the site to help with an investigation. But when you combine a search engine that can behave a dozen different ways with users that already have a hundred tabs open and a bad habit of tool-hopping, it’s hard to know whether the site’s value is limited to the search function or if that’s the only capability that they understand enough to use. That’s what we set out to find out and improve.

My Role:

UX Research, UI Design, Prototyping, User Testing

Project Duration:

3 weeks (October 2020-November 2020)

My Team:

Nichole T., Ashley K., Brooke N.

Methods Used:

3-Week Design Sprint, Agile & Scrum Methodology, Screener Surveys, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Persona Development, Journey Mapping, Problem Statement, Competitive Matrix, Feature Comparison Analysis, MoSCoW Map, Design Studio Sketching, Wireframing, Rapid Prototyping, Usability Test and Reports, Case Study Research Reports

Tools Used:

Figma, Zeplin, Keynote, Slack, Zoom, Otter

The Challenge:

Streamline the research process and cut out the noise for cybersecurity professionals while also communicating the full functionality of the site to improve strategic KPIs for Pulsedive.

The Solution:

A website redesign focused on efficiency, customization, and control for the users while bringing light and context to robust but currently underused features.

Key Features:

Streamlined Home Page: Focused landing page on search engine capabilities and communicated query search as an offered feature

“I only expect to see data after I have completed a search or added a filter.”- Ky

Simplified Search Results Page: A combination of the four types of existing search results pages into one optimized view that will allow cybersecurity users to get all the contextual information they need in one place

“I just want to see all my data through a single pane of glass.”- Craig

Customizable News Dashboard: Optimized dashboard with buildable filters and built-out side panel preview functionality so users can control what information they look at and don’t have to open another tab to do so

“I wish the dashboard was more customized to what I’m interested in.” -Doug

The Impact

A website design that respects the time-sensitivity of users’ investigations and quickly gets them what they need while definitively improving user awareness of other advanced site features and documentation on how to use them.

The Process

Background - Let‘s start from the beginning…

Founded in 2017, Pulsedive is a community-driven database and search engine that provides cybersecurity professionals with the actionable and real-time contextual information they need to make quick decisions regarding the security posture of their company or their clients. While the search function is utilized in earnest by most users, Pulsedive leadership wanted to know why other robust features such as exportable CSV lists of data or buildable query searching were not receiving the attention they deserved. They brought our team on to determine why those features were being under-utilized as well as to improve the user experience through the site as a whole.

Target Audience - Let’s get specific…

Cyber-security professionals that currently use Pulsedive for one-off searches, leaving with a piece of information to do more research in other tools without further exploring the site. Through the course of the project, my team spoke to nineteen cybersecurity professionals working in countries around the world.

User Research - What did we learn from talking with Pulsedive users?

1. Users struggle to orient themselves within the Pulsedive website
2. Users are confused by the purpose and use-case for the Explore page
3. Users want to be able to customize their dashboard view
4. Users believed they had landed on the Explore page after searching even if they were on a specific indicator or threat page

Checkpoint 1: Users are confused by the ins and outs of the site and want more control of where they go and what they see.. time to empathize!

Persona - Meet Tim!

Our team created Tim - a persona - from data gathered during user interviews. Because there is such a diversity and variety to the ways users are using Pulsedive, it was imperative that our team identify one use case and solution around that one use case. You know what they say: if you try to solve for everyone, you end up solving for no one!

Journey Map - Let’s understand what Tim has to go through…

Anybody that has spent any significant amount of time with a cyber-security professional knows that they move at one hundred miles a minute, pivoting off data points to different areas in a frenzy until they finally find that elusive piece of information that aids in their investigation. They can’t always tell you what they’re looking for ahead of time, but they know it when they find it. What happens when they end up somewhere they don’t expect, understand, or know how to get out of? Let’s see…

Checkpoint 2: Tim is only used to ending up on specific threat or indicator pages, so when he suddenly finds himself on the Explore page that shows a whole new type of dataset, he is disoriented, quickly frustrated, and decides to leave the site. That’s where our team’s opportunity lies… so let’s validate the problem we are solving for!

How might we help Pulsedive users streamline their research to find data that will help them improve their security posture?

The Re-Design:

After conducting a MoSCoW map and a design studio with our clients, our team established the following decisions for our mid-fidelity prototype.

1. The Explore page would serve as the new home page for logged in users
2. We would combine the threat, indicator, feeds, and linked indicators search results pages into one simplified destination
3. We would add buildable filters and side panel preview features to the dashboard, giving users more control of what data they saw and how they saw it

Checkpoint 3: Our redesign improves strategic business KPIs like time on page and user engagement by ensuring that the user's search lands them on the explore page. It also improves user experience by giving them instant access to functionality they care about most and more control over their experience.

Testing:

We went through three rounds of usability testing, one on the current Pulsedive website, one on our mid-fidelity prototype, and one on our hi-fidelity prototype. Here’s what we learned from each round of testing.

Mid-Fidelity- Insights to Design Changes

Hi-Fidelity- Insights

Checkpoint 4: Our hi-fi prototype performance dramatically increased from mid-fi: our success rate increased 20%, our time on task decreased an average of 10 seconds, and our overall user difficulty rating decreased. So we know our hi-fi was an improvement from our mid-fi, but was it an improvement to the current site? Let’s compare insights gathered from the current site to our final prototype design to see how we addressed those issues.

Current Site to Final Prototype Comparison

Where Business Goals and User Goals Diverge:

What happens when your client has a feature that they really believe in and want you to redesign but your initial user research tells you that users don’t need it? You do more research, of course! Our team, including our client, made the decision to include an additional component to our project outside the use case we solved for in web redesign: to research buildable query searching.

This form of searching allows users to add multiple indicators, threats, etc. to one search to continually narrow down the results with more specificity. While this is a highly robust feature on the website, we found that it was not a feature any of our users were using through Pulsedive and that most weren’t using it in general through any tool.

To gather this research, we conducted an additional ten case studies where we asked users about recent investigations, their current interaction with the Explore feature on Pulsedive, their use case for buildable search querying, and other tools they were using to accomplish this. Due to the specificity of this use case and the overall lack of user familiarity with the query functionality of the Explore page on Pulsedive, there wasn’t an overall trend in how users preferred to query search; however, we were able to identify another example of how a search query could function from one of our case studies.

The current functionality of the query search on Pulsedive involves entering in queries one at a time, pressing enter to make them add to the query and drop below the search bar, with the results updating as you add queries.

One user we spoke with told us she was more familiar with querying where she types an individual query, presses tab, and the query populated within the search bar with an option to remove it. Once all her queries are added to the search bar, she is able to press enter to search the entire query at once. This behavior helps her intuitively understand that the search is buildable as opposed to being done after one query is submitted.

We made sure to emphasize to our clients that this is just an example of how one of their users expects search queries to perform and that we definitely recommend more user research and testing before implementing a design of this nature. However, because it was a client priority, we wanted to provide a concrete example of another way query searches could perform to serve as inspiration for future research and design iterations.

Next Steps:

1. Implement design changes from hi-fidelity usability testing insights
2. Conduct further user research on buildable query searching
3. Build out design ideas for the query search function based on user research
4. Conduct usability tests on the next iteration of prototype design