Chia Ofonagoro

Thursday, May 15

6:24:46 AM

Chia O!

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About

02: The 8 hour design sprint.

July 2022 / Rebellion Defense

Project at a glance

PROJECT AT A GLANCE

ROLE
Product Design Intern

ROLE
UX Designer & Researcher

YEAR
2021 - 2022

BRIEF SUMMARY
For my capstone project at my UX Bootcamp, I wanted to understand and reimagine what goal tracking looked like for busy adults.

TEAM
Rebellion Design Team, Front end Engineer

BRIEF SUMMARY
Over the course of a day, the Rebellion design team understood, solutioned, and demoed ideas to potentially display over 10,000 items on an attack surface of a national security application.

OUTCOME
My team's solution was passed to the product manager and added to the Jira backlog.

What were we trying to solve?

When using Rebellion's cyber readiness tool, analysts need to quickly understand what devices are connected to which network. The current visual element was ideal for a small number of devices and networks, but quickly became overwhelming when faced with a legion of assets.

This made it near impossible to decipher which devices were most critical, and thus needed attention first.

What were we trying to solve?

When using Rebellion's cyber readiness tool, analysts need to quickly understand what devices are connected to which network. The current visual element was ideal for a small number of devices and networks, but quickly became overwhelming when faced with a legion of assets.

This made it near impossible to decipher which devices were most critical, and thus needed attention first.

How we measured success

Our main goal for the sprint was to ideate a solution that accounts for the technical constraints of the tool, without compromising the user experience. On a personal level, this was an opportunity for me to strengthen my design thinking and ideating skills while under a tight deadline.

How we measured success

Our main goal for the sprint was to ideate a solution that accounts for the technical constraints of the tool, without compromising the user experience. On a personal level, this was an opportunity for me to strengthen my design thinking and ideating skills while under a tight deadline.

It's a marathon, not a sprint

A shared understanding

I was apart of the team responsible for the tool, so we were already familiar with the complexity of the problem space. But because the sprint involved the whole Rebellion's design team, we kicked off with a product demo to get everyone up to speed.

Once we established a shared understanding, we did an in-depth exploration into cyber analysts' needs, pain points, and workflows. These conversations helped facilitate a deeper understanding of the key user journey.

A shared understanding

I was apart of the team responsible for the tool, so we were already familiar with the complexity of the problem space. But because the sprint involved the whole Rebellion's design team, we kicked off with a product demo to get everyone up to speed.

Once we established a shared understanding, we did an in-depth exploration into cyber analysts' needs, pain points, and workflows. These conversations helped facilitate a deeper understanding of the key user journey.

crazy 8's and dot voting

My inspiration came from a lot of different places: my background in science, geographical map applications, and even the Xbox home screen. When time was up, we shared our sketches - and all the unexpected places they came from.

Exploring new ideas

My inspiration came from a lot of different places: my background in science, geographical map applications, and even the Xbox home screen.

With lots of ideas on the whiteboard, we categorized into general themes, and did some dot voting to form small teams.

The other intern and I took our identified patterns and started exploring alternative ways to represent the concepts in each page type. Our component would need to accommodate datasets in different forms, so we had to think outside of the box.

An unexpected roadblock

Choosing to explore the concept of ‘prioritization’, my teammate and I quickly determined what we would prioritize: only a small number of critical vulnerabilities in a network. We then had to figure out when to prioritize them. And where? Suddenly ‘prioritization’ felt too narrow, so we shifted to the idea of 'promotion'.

We proposed promoting only vulnerable devices to avoid overwhelming our users. But after a reviewing the information architecture, we realized that the data that would indicate a device's criticality was split across multiple pages - and at different levels. What's worse, there was no mention of their status on the main dashboard, making it so users would have to work to find out this information.

Rearranging the
information
architecture

Faced with a new obstacle to solve before we even addressed the original problem statement, we immediately got to work reorganizing. With time dwindling down, we really leaned into this pivot and embraced our unexpected solution, which focused on where critical vulnerabilities should be promoted, rather than how.

Rearranging the
information
architecture

Faced with a new obstacle to solve before we even addressed the original problem statement, we immediately got to work reorganizing. With time dwindling down, we really leaned into this pivot and embraced our unexpected solution, which focused on where critical vulnerabilities should be promoted, rather than how.

a (super) quick
demo

What seemed like a hurdle ended up exposing gaps in the user experience of the tool, but it came at the expense of actually validating our solution. Nevertheless, we demoed our solution once time was up.

a (super) quick
demo

What seemed like a hurdle ended up exposing gaps in the user experience of the tool, but it came at the expense of actually validating our solution. Nevertheless, we demoed our solution once time was up.

Outcome

After the sprint was over, every team's solution was passed along to the PM and was added to the Jira backlog. Later, I saw an opportunity to practice my visual design skills and turned our demo sketch into a higher fidelity dashboard concept.