Last updated at Mon, 31 Jul 2017 17:38:01 GMT

While using our products, we want you to have the best possible experience. The Design team at Rapid7 is focusing a lot on UX Research and analyzing all the feedback you have been providing us. As designers, we want to fix everything at once. However, after doing a reality check with product leads, it's clear that we have to take an incremental approach. That way you do not have to wait long for our new releases and updates. The first thing you use Nexpose for is to collect data. Everything else comes later. So we decided to start with simplifying the scanning experience.

BEFORE:
Existing Product

Site configuration had multi-level navigation, which was a bit confusing, and sometimes this was time-consuming to configure.

For example, in the screenshot “A” of the old system, you can see that there are multiple ways to navigate, whereby clicking “Previous” and “Next” buttons will do the same thing as clicking through the Site Configuration sub-menu. In the screenshot “B”, you can see that there are multiple vital, yet disparate sections hidden away in the scan setup section, when less important sections, such as alerting and credentials are part of the Site Configuration navigation.

AFTER:
Simplified Minimalist Design

So that you do not have to remember more jargon, we removed the words “Dynamic” and “Static” from sites. Now, you will find it much more intuitive to configure sites in this wizard as the wizard will ask you to either provide Asset ID or connect to another source like AWS or vSphere to provide the scope of the site. We also added a few subtle features for you to get your job accomplished quickly:

  • Five out of seven steps in the wizard are prefilled with the default configuration, so if you are in a rush and are fine with default settings, just hit the “Run Now” button on the top to run a quick scan without tabbing through each step.
  • For error prevention and faster configuration, we have added an indicator on top of each step (tab) to represent if that step has any required fields. Thus, attention seeking tabs have a red line, which turns to green once the required field is complete.
  • Clean minimalistic design with bold icons are used to indicate tab contents.

One Site, Unlimited Templates and Schedules

That's right! In the new site configuration wizard, you have the ability to use multiple templates and assign multiple schedules per site.

I was reading a book the other day called “The Power of Customer Misbehavior” in which the author explains how users find ways to use products in the most unintended ways, and how we as product designers can learn from this behavior.

Some of our related leanings are:

  • Customers create multiple copies of the same site to scan the same assets with different templates.
  • A lot of our customers also use Nexpose as an asset inventory tool, so they like to scan the same site with both a discovery template (for inventory) and for instance, a more robust audit template (for vulnerability management).

We hope you enjoy using the new design! We will continue to build on top of this design and to add more robust features to make the scan experience seamless and automated.

For a video of the new interface, check out: Exploring the Nexpose Site Creation Interface. We would love to hear from you. Leave us your comments and suggestions!