The team aims to revolutionize the bloated and ineffective world of application security and protect engineers from chasing false positives, vague alerts, and mountains of useless findings. They needed to stand out from UIs of the other, visually “noisy” security tools, which typically display dozens of essential and insignificant events on the same dashboard. The Ghost Security app should provide users with easy-to-understand insights, group them, assign priorities, and focus the user’s attention on the most critical details.
When the team was building their MVP, they invited Evil Martians to help design the key UI elements of the tool. These elements would adhere to a central concept: a vibrant visualization and “noise-free” data display.
Therefore, it was important for the Evil Martians Design Team to strike a balance between the complexity of data presented with a simplicity of vision, while avoiding sophisticated tables. We needed to optimize the table structures, combine different but relevant data on one screen, and use colors and icons to suggest a range of priorities instead of textual explanations (for example, icons to represent the “Severity” level instead of “Critical-High-Medium-Low” text.)
To face this challenge, we would leverage the deep industry experience of the Ghost Security team, our expertise in security dev tool UIs, and a sound engineering pattern of collecting potential user feedback at every stage of product development.
The product needed to look vivid, with bright colors and effects, appropriate visualizations, and it had to favor graphics over tables, raw data, and texts. Additionally, the team decided not to utilize ready-made UI libraries, as they wanted to design a unique user interface. The team also wanted the design to be easy in terms of the frontend implementation (the Evil Martians team was also responsible for the frontend development using the Vue framework that the core team leverages for their product.)
By sticking to the designer as a product owner approach and maintaining an MVP mindset, we managed to help the project team quickly implement an essential marketing asset—a product demo for investors. This was made possible via our recommendations on reducing the scope of work, leaving only the most critical features, and faster ways to implement the solution.
Currently, the MVP design is in progress, and we’re also developing a design system—stay tuned!
