Michigan software Security

Project Details

My Roles: UX Design, UX Research

Tools: Sketch, Miro

Duration: 6 months

Teammates: Client Scrum Master, Client Business Consultant

Overview

The State of Michigan requires that all of the software they own and manage gets regular security scans but they’ve had a hard time increasing adoption throughout the agencies. I worked closely with a few members of the State of Michigan’s DTMB team to investigage this issue and to coach them on how to integrate Human-Centered Design into their day-to-day work. This project was a good mix of UX research, wireframing and prototyping, and coaching.

Business Objective

Our initial success metric for this product was simply increasing the number of security scan requests by state employees. We quickly realized that wouldn’t be enough to achieve the state’s security goals, so then we pivoted to greatly increasing the number of automated tests being run on state-owned software.

User Research

We started off the project with user and stakeholder interviews to get an understanding of what was working and what wasn’t working with the current process. We then created an affinity map of all our feedback to identify our critical opportunities.

Prototyping

Based on our user research, we started to ideate on what the future state could look like and then I created wireframes of an end-to-end prototype. I conducted usability tests on the experience, while my DTMB teammates took notes and followed along. Based on user feedback, I also created some wireframes to show what an informational SharePoint site.

Coaching

Honestly, being able to coach up others on HCD is one of my favorite parts of this job. I think all organizations can benefit from thinking this way even if they don’t always have the money to hire a dedicated UX team. For this particular engagement, I was coaching my teammates on how to do usability testing, how to do solution sketches, and how to affinity map your research findings to share in a report. I also created a UX toolkit for them to use in the future.