1 min
User Experience
Snakes Masquerading as Vines
We spend a lot of time identifying trustworthiness in our day-to-day lives. We
constantly evaluate trustworthiness in both the people that we meet and in the
products and services that we decide to interact with.
Imagine that you're like Tarzan in the jungle; you're trying to navigate your
way through products and services using the vines that hang in your path. Each
vine either helps or hinders your path forward. Some are stronger than others
and help you swing a far distance quickly and effec
4 min
User Experience
12 Days of HaXmas: Designing Information Security Applications Your Way
Merry HaXmas to you! Each year we mark the 12 Days of HaXmas [/tag/haxmas/] with
12 days of blog posts on hacking-related topics and roundups from the year. This
year, we're highlighting some of the “gifts” we want to give back to the
community. And while these gifts may not come wrapped with a bow, we hope you
enjoy them.
Are you a busy Information Security professional that prefers bloated web
applications, fancy interactions, unnecessary visuals, and overloaded screens
that are difficult to
5 min
User Experience
Building Personalized and Exceptional Customer Experiences
Building personalized and exceptional customer experiences
At Rapid7, we strive to give you, our customers, a personalized and exceptional
experience every time you interact with our organization, our products, and our
services. This is what we refer to as the "Customer Experience". In order to
clarify what this term means, Don Peppers from the Peppers & Rogers Group
defines the Customer Experience as “the totality of a customer's individual
interactions with a brand, over time”.
We are all cus
4 min
User Experience
Synergistically Yours, IoT Security-Usability
Let me tell you a story….
…a few months ago, I was going home from an airport in an Uber with my wife. We
recently bought a house and were looking for some renovation work and discussing
few ideas on the way. The very next day, I received a call from an unknown
number—the caller said “Hello Mr. Dutta, I am [caller's name] calling from
[company name]. I would love to discuss the home renovation project you are
planning to undertake in your home”. At this point his words started blurring as
my min
3 min
User Experience
How to Fail Successfully
The Revolutionary Pied Piper Platform
I watch a few shows quite religiously and HBO's Silicon Valley is one of them on
my summer list. In a nutshell, the show is about a group of engineers starting
their own company—Pied Piper—with a revolutionary data compression algorithm,
and the plot revolves around all the good, the bad, and the ugly a startup can
encounter and then some more.
(Spoilers ahead, but seriously watch the show if you're interested; it's pretty
good)
Towards the end of this la
3 min
User Experience
Simplifying BIG Data Within Information Security Applications
Rapid7 wants to help organizations leverage all their data to gain powerful
insights into their data security, find and fix exposures that lead to
compromise. The User Experience (UX) team at Rapid7 designed a set of tools that
help users handle the volume and complexity of their data to make it simple to
analyze and remediate on time. But this wasn't a simple task; it took us about a
year and a long process of discovery, analysis, strategy, research, design, and
production to deliver Nexpose No
5 min
Log Search
Log Search Simplified
Hi, I'm Laura, UX Designer at Logentries and today I'm going to discuss how just
about anyone can use Logentries to search and analyze their log data no matter
what their job title or technical skill level.
What is Logentries?
At Logentries, the team works tirelessly to provide an easy to use log
management service [https://logentries.com/?CS=R7blog] that allows users to
stream their logs from just about anything. Logentries can accept data from
almost any device that generates log data, inclu
4 min
User Experience
UX Research: Steps & Methodologies to Inform Product Redesign
The user experience (UX) design and research teams are preparing to revamp
Rapid7's customer learning and online help. As such, I thought I would take the
opportunity to provide our community insight into the role UX research plays in
bringing new designs – of both new and existing features and experiences – to
fruition.
Before I begin, I'll tell you a little bit about our “research” team. The Rapid7
UX research team, which sits within the greater UX team, consists of myself and
my colleague Ge
4 min
User Experience
Designing Authentication
At Rapid7 security is everything, and that doesn't exclude the UX team. Yes, we
want to give you beautiful interactions, seamless workflows and screens that
make you go ‘Wow!' But security is always there gently guiding our design
decisions, which can sometimes cause conflict between security best practices
and the best user experience.
Following on from an excellent post from Roy Hodgman
[/2016/03/01/the-attackers-dictionary], one of the most common examples of the
impact of security on user e
4 min
User Experience
Using Color within Data Visualization
Admit It, You Love Color!
Any of the Rapid7 products you use involves interacting to some extent with
color. Living in a achromatic world would be dull, compared to a world drenched
in colors. Why? Because, color helps us in a number of ways. It can:
* Help us to distinguish one object from another
* Cause actions and reactions
* Influence our thinking
* Play an important role in conveying quantitative information.
Imagine an air traffic control center whereby the colors used to convey dat
4 min
User Experience
Security-in-Your-Pocket (SiYP)
The World is Not Flat, It's Mobile
At Rapid7, we are always thinking about how we can make your life easier. Now
that there are more mobile devices than people in the world1, our thoughts are
turning toward mobile, specifically mobile versions of our Information Security
applications. While we have no immediate plans, it's certainly an area we are
interested in. But that depends on you, our customer. Are mobile versions of our
Information Security applications something you would like to see Ra
3 min
User Experience
Atomic Design @ Rapid7
Device-Level Design Should Not Be A Thing
Large monitors, small monitors, laptops, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches,
toasters, refrigerators…where will it end? Nowadays, application designers need
to consider a plethora of devices as they design. While we are not considering
designing Nexpose and InsightIDR for your toaster, maybe one day we will!
Although, Brad Frost tells the world of design that device-level design is an
outdated concept. That's news to our ears! Let's look at this more c
3 min
User Experience
What Is Responsive Design, Really?
Responsive Design has been a buzzword for quite some time now. According to
Google, this blog post just became one of the 158,000,000 articles you can find
when you search the phrase; so what's there left to talk about?
What Is Responsive Design?
When you search the phrase Responsive Design, you'll notice the search engine
kindly reminds you that the term should be Responsive Web Design (RWD). Sure,
the notion of device-based design didn't start blooming until browsers began to
support differen
2 min
User Experience
UX Engineering
In most organizations today, building widgets is a separate process from
designing widgets. Designers sit over here. Developers sit over there. Designers
come up with ‘ideas' and then throw them over the wall to the Developers sitting
on the other side. The Developers build what they think the Designers wanted and
then deliver that back for Design approval. Nine times out of ten, Design is
surprised to see something that only loosely resembles their original idea.
Why is that? Well, the goal
4 min
User Experience
Applying Visual Design Principles to Improve Signal to Noise in Security UI
As we design the product experience at Rapid7, a key challenge for our team is
the presentation of critical security information in clear, immediate ways
despite the sheer amount of network and user data displayed in the user
interface. We refer to this as a signal-to-noise challenge: important data can
be easily lost against the background of unimportant information.
Since invisibility is a valuable part of a hacker's toolkit, we can use the
power of visual design to improve security simply by