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Challenge
Trendmicro, one of the leaders in the network security industry, wanted to create a centralized computer virus outbreak management software called Control Manager.
Goal of this software was to simplify enterprise-wide coordination of outbreak security actions and management of Trendmicro products and services.
Solution
As the user experience lead for the project, my responsibilities included: interaction design, user research, managing jr. designers and relationship with outside design agency, and participate in the overall product strategy.
From the beginning of the project, I worked closely with the product managers, engineering lead, and key customers to understand the business goals, market environment, and the technology that will be used to build the product. And, for the first time in company’s history, I convinced the management team to apply user centered design process to the project.
As part of the user centered design process, I worked with a small team of internal designers and consultants to conduct user research before any prototyping or coding began. My team used following techniques to gather both quantitative and qualitative data from the users located in United States, Japan, and Europe:
Phone interviews, contextual inquiries, analyzing the customer support data, reviewing strength and weaknesses of the competing products, and participatory design workshop with the key customers.
Using the data gathered from the user research , I worked with my team to create the personas (target user profiles), use cases, and task workflows that were used to prototype the software and communicate the design with the stakeholders. Most of the prototypes were created in Visio, and imported into Visual Studio to make the prototype more interactive.
Also during the project, I designed and managed the construction of the usability lab. After each project milestone, we conducted several onsite and remote usability tests to discover and fix any high level usability problems.
Some of the key discoveries from the user interviews and participatory design sessions revealed that:
* Generating useful and customizable security reports was very important for corporate customers.
* In large corporations and government, there were many signoffs that had to be made before any defensive actions could be made.
* After the network attack, network administrators wanted easy way downloading any third party patches and tools from various vendors.
Based on the key discoveries, I worked with my team to design a intuitive UI for browser based software that can be easily accessed through VPN, report generator with the security report templates that can be easily customized, personalized user interface based user’s role and security privileges, and presentation framework that third party vendors could use to integrate their solution with the Control Manager without sacrificing the branding and user interface consistency.
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Result
Since the product release, Control Manager received rave reviews from the customers, industry analysts, and the media, including:
PC Magazine Editors’ Choice Award and Network Magazine Product of the Year.
 
Currently, Control Manager is being used in many Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies, and universities to protect their organization from the malicious computer attacks.
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