Resilience Recommendations

This project was a UX pitch that I created for Resilience Recommendations, which live in Expel’s flagship product, Workbench. Every time Expel catches a security incident in a customer’s environment, the analysts can recommend actions the customer could take to avoid these types of incidents in the future (thus, strengthening their resilience.)

There were two major issues that led me to drive my own discovery and design phase to create a pitch for our Product Management team:

1. The UI had not been maintained since its launch, and had become inconsistent with the rest of the platform.

2. The page had little user engagement.

I did a lot of both qualitative and quantitative research to start out. For quantitative research, I asked one of our engineers to pull metrics on how often Resilience Recommendations were being actioned on, as well as which specific Recommendations were most often added to Incidents.

The most startling piece of data: in the past year, only 36 Resilience Recommendations were marked as “won’t do” or “done” out of 2064 that were recommended. That’s 0.017%. 

For qualitative research, I started with combing through past Slack threads and asking our Product Managers and other UXers what their thoughts were on the feature. I then wrote two surveys - one targeted at our SOC analysts, and one targeted at our Engagement Managers - and sent those out for responses. Finally, I searched for Resilience Recommendations in Gong, the software our sales team uses to record calls with customers. I found that in the last month, 19% of all calls mentioned Resilience Recommendations. That’s a big difference from the usage numbers that we found. 

I also ran a cross-team workshop with representation from Engagement Managers, Product Managers, and UX. We did a rapid hypothesis writing session, some crazy 8s sketching, and then time for each participant to choose one idea to expand upon further and sketch in more detail. 

After the workshop, I created some low-fidelity mockups for improvements to the Resilience Recommendations page, as well as to the Resilience Recommendations cards that show up on Incident reports. I took those mockups to three customer interviews, where I was able to ask general questions about how they use the feature today (if at all) and for feedback on the direction of the mockups. 

One customer said, “If you incorporated what we talked about, that would make me excited about this feature. It makes things easier to use.”

We also heard that it “looks much better, and we can more clearly see the Incidents connected to these.” For the most part, the feedback was very positive, and all three customers preferred the new design to the existing one. There were a few minor improvement suggestions that came out of the calls, such as changing the specific metric in one of the graphs at the top, and changing the wording of some of the possible statuses that a Resilience Recommendation can have. 

After the customer calls, I put together a pitch deck and recorded a talk track to socialize within the company. 

One Product Manager said the following after watching the pitch video: “Abbey shared with me your Resilience Recommendations video and you’ve absolutely blown me away. Your analysis and breakdown of the problem was stellar and the wireframe is already a million times better than what we have.” 

Currently, I am still anxiously awaiting this project being officially prioritized and added to our roadmap. Unfortunately, there were some strategic pivots shortly after I finished my pitch, and there are other priorities that the company is going after. I hope to be able to pick this back up someday, as I still strongly believe it would be a big value-add for Expel. 

If you’re interested, here is a sanitized version of my pitch deck.

Additional Feedback

“The new mock is dope AF” - Expel SOC Operations Director

“Love the mockup. Much much better.” - Expel Global Solutions Architect

“Maddy. MADDY. I freakin’ loved it.” - Expel UX Director, on watching the pitch video for the first time