Silobreaker is covering everything from cyber to physical and geopolitical risks
The SaaS application helps security experts to discover and analyse risks in either structured or unstructured datasets in real time. This is a time consuming task without specialised software such as Silobreaker. It is typically used by security operation teams in large corporations in the tech, finance, retail, medical and energy sector but also by governmental organisations.
My Role
Leading the design of all new product features from exploration to launch, improving the overall user experience, conduct stakeholder interviews and user testing and help prioritising the product roadmap together with other stakeholders and expand user centric design thinking in the cross functional team through training and workshop sessions.
Highlights from 6 Years
- On my own initiative, I completely redesigned the web application, presented it to the company’s stakeholders, and got their approval. This set the direction for a modern, scalable user interface that would last for years.
- As a result, I also led a rebranding effort, launching a new brand identity alongside the redesigned web app.
- This helped us go from having just a few cyber security clients to selling licenses to high-profile companies, significantly increasing deal sizes over time.
- I also assessed and redesigned an internal tool that was key to the product’s value, helping analysts respond to incidents much more quickly.
- One content partner said, ‘I choose Silobreaker over our app to view our own content because it’s so much nicer to use.’
- And a customer shared, ‘I love that you show real screenshots of your app on the website, not just photoshopped mock-ups like other companies do.’
The Beginning: Learning and Identifying Issues and Opportunities
I asked colleagues from different departments to run a product demo and to give me their view on the product. This helped me to understand the complex Silobreaker platform from different perspectives and gain first insights.
For someone with experience in UX, there were many visible issues in the user interface but one key insight in this phase was that “My pages” were displayed as tabs and over time, the number for some users had increased by so many, that the tabs would take up half of their viewport or more, leading the content to be pushed down – sometimes even below the fold.
Understanding the Market
When I joined Silobreaker, the company was going through a big change. It was moving from being a platform mainly for the finance industry to an application that could be used for many different purposes with a focus on cyber security. At the time, the cyber security industry was changing too. Just securing IT systems wasn’t enough anymore, so new, more wholistic ways to security were needed. The Silobreaker entity based text recognition system was a perfect fit to accomplish this.
Understanding the User
Companies are dealing with many risks that could disrupt their operations, like supply chain problems from natural disasters, accidents, or attacks, as well as reputation damage, physical threats to their offices, data leaks, hacking, ransomware, and more. Security teams are constantly trying to keep up with these changing threats. There’s always the worry of missing something important, and time is critical.
Solving First Problems
To solve the hierarchy issue, I first created an application map of the existing platform. Next, I reorganised everything, creating initial sketches and design ideas while rethinking the structure. The goal was to make the platform a useful tool for security analysts’ daily work. Anything unrelated to that purpose was either removed or moved to the marketing website. ‘My Pages’ became ‘Dashboards’ and was no longer buried among other items. The new menu followed a logical order. This marked the start of transforming the platform from something that felt like an outdated news site into a modern application with various analytics and workflow tools.
Iterations, New Features and Relaunch
We continued refining the design and developed a plan to replace the old platform with the new one. Since we didn’t have the resources to make the change all at once, we decided to apply some of the key learnings from the new design in smaller updates to the existing platform to remove some of the biggest pain points. At the same time, we worked on the full redesign behind the scenes. This approach allowed us to stay flexible and continue releasing updates and new features to our existing customers while working on the new version of the app.
After the successful relaunch, we added many more new tools and features, analysed user journeys, and optimised workflows, added specialised content, … too much to list everything here, but the app’s design architecture and growing design system have stood the test of time and feedback from old and new customers was positive.
I choose Silobreaker over our application to look at our own content, because it is so much nicer to use.
Quote from a content partner
In-Depth Look: Redesign of the Management Center
Besides the main desktop product and the less important mobile app, there was one tool critical to daily operations and the platform’s value: the Management Center. This tool, used to manage all entities and aliases in the system, hadn’t been updated in years. The technology it was built on was being phased out, and it had several UX problems.
The management center before the redesign.
Research
I started by interviewing stakeholders and users of the Management Center, but I quickly realised I needed to see how people were actually using the system. So, we set up a few sessions where I could observe analyst admins while they worked in the tool.
Beyond the technical issues, I spotted several areas for improvement. For example, during an incident like a shooting, specific locations or people involved hadn’t been created in the system yet. This led analysts to juggle many open tabs, constantly switching between them or getting lost trying to find the right one.
Another issue was the log, which would only tell them something hadn’t gone through, but didn’t provide enough detail to figure out what exactly failed. All of these problems were wasting valuable time.
Ideation with Product Dimensions and User Workflow Diagrams
The Solution
While sketching different ideas, it became clear that we needed something beyond typical UI patterns to solve the issue of working with multiple tabs. The main idea was to display as much relevant information as possible. To do this, I designed a flexible card system with different types of cards, each showing specific info or functionality. In the end, there would be a horizontal row of cards that could expand as much as needed, but related cards would always stay next to each other, making it easy to find and edit information within the card, right in context.
After prototyping and getting feedback from the analysts, we launched the new Management Center, along with a new log that provided helpful details. This was a big improvement, saving time on creating entities.
But we didn’t stop there. We integrated the log and other features into the main product, so analysts could stay in one place and keep track of what was happening in the Management Center.
To speed things up even more, we added AI to automatically identify potential new entities and suggest aliases or related entities. The redesign was well received and removed a major pain point from the daily work of analyst admins.
Things I have learned
- Using frameworks like the 7 Product Dimensions helps bring design and development together early in a project, allowing teams to explore and solve complex problems in a structured way.
- Content is crucial, but first impressions are key. While users saw value in Silobreaker, the redesign took the experience to a whole new level, adding more value in a competitive and maturing market.
- How to recognise and overcome bias in decision making.
- Conducting user and stakeholder interviews is a great way to solve complex problems and uncover hidden issues.
- How aligning business and product strategy and prioritising the roadmap together creates confidence in what to build next.
Addendum: The Rebrand
With my background in a marketing and brand agency, we were able to roll out a new brand identity that unified the Silobreaker appearance and aligned it with our product line.
To show the founders why this was needed, I created a style board that showcased the ideas across different areas. It was well-received and moved forward, including a new logo, custom icons, booth designs, marketing materials, and the corporate website. Every customer touchpoint plays a role in the overall user experience.
Corporate Website
Storytelling was key to the relaunch of the corporate website. With so many use cases, it was often unclear to customers how Silobreaker could benefit their business. The solution was to create industry-specific showcases that highlighted relevant tools and information from Silobreaker, paired with carefully chosen imagery that avoided the typical clichés used by other cyber security companies.
One of the use-case pages on the new corporate website
I also applied insights from books and blog posts. For example, I placed the demo booking form at the bottom of every page, rather than just a button leading to another page (1), and I moved the message text area to the top of the contact form before asking for user details (2).
Please note, after a few years and with an investor onboard, the website has since evolved and looks different now.
- In a post on Medium, someone described how changing to a contact form at the bottom of every page increased the requests sent by over 30% (while no changes were made to the website otherwise)
- From the book Don’t make me think! Explanation in short: Put the users needs first. So simple, so logical and yet most (contact) forms start with personal details or other information.