Maddy Settle
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Event Search

Event Search

Responsibilities:

Initial research including interviews & process observation; mockups & interactive prototypes; moderated usability testing; presenting to internal teams for feedback; working with developers on final styles; etc.

Timeline:

2 weeks initial research
8 weeks design/iteration

Other Contributors:

Emily Garton (early research before I joined Expel); Patrick Duffy (Product Manager); Daren McCulley (Engineering Manager)

When I joined Expel, I quickly learned that one of the company’s biggest points of pride was transparency for its customers. However, there was something missing that was causing confusion. Expel’s platform ingests a huge amount of events and alerts from customers’ security technology, and then surfaces up the most important events to the Security Operations Center based on a large set of rules and filters. Sometimes, a customer would notice something in their own environment and not be able to find it in Expel’s platform, Workbench, as an alert. This could be because the event was low-fidelity, or was something that in the past the customer had agreed was likely benign. However, not having a way to know if Expel even saw that event in the first place was causing a lack of trust and an increase in working hours for our customer-facing Engagement Managers (EMs). We built this tool to help with both the process speed of Engagement Managers finding answers, and to allow customers to self-service their questions more often.

The final product

I started this project by interviewing some of our EMs, and observing their existing process for finding answers to the question of “why isn’t this event in Workbench?” It was a long, complex process that involved third-party tools. Observing this process allowed me to see the specific parameters that users were providing to our EMs, as well as what type of information was available in the results that came back. I then gathered inspiration from other enterprise products with advanced search capabilities. Armed with the knowledge of what was needed, some interface inspiration, and a team of internal stakeholders that were ready to collaborate at a moment’s notice, I started ideating on workflows and where this feature might live in the product. This started a cycle of mockups, gathering feedback, iterations, and interactive prototyping.

One of the coolest things about this project was the speed of development and the quick move to improve on the first version.

Within 3 months, we had a fully functioning feature in the product, that we were then able to test with our EMs. This allowed us to test usability and the actual data that came back from the search code at the same time. Based on what we learned in these calls, we were able to make improvements to the feature before it went out live for all internal Expel users and external customers to use. Some of the changes we made included updating wording to make it more clear, removing a column from the results table that was confusing and did not add value, and improving the backend code after seeing multiple timeouts occur when users searched real-life scenarios.

This feature helped us win the biggest deal in Expel history!

Event Search had a slow internal rollout starting in May, with a full public launch in August. During that time, one of our Solutions Architects actually used this feature when pitching a prospective customer. He said “it helped solidify not only that we are transparent about what we do with our customers' tech, we listen to the feedback we get on ways to improve that transparency.”

Feedback

On the feature:

“This makes it much easier for us to find alerts we want to validate Workbench received” - one of Expel’s largest customers

“Easy UI, answers the question of “did this become an Expel alert” or “did you receive these events” very easily” - Expel Engagement Manager

“We have a customer that has essentially been in Yellow since winter time… I’m happy to say that this feature (in tandem with some awesome EMs) has moved this customer back-2-green.” - Expel Engagement Manger

On my work:

“I hadn’t met Maddy previously but we had a customer call together yesterday to do an interview around Event Search. I was so impressed by Maddy’s warmth and kindness as well as confidence and ease, they were able to very quickly establish rapport with the customer and handled the call perfectly!” - Expel Engagement Mananger

“Maddy absolutely crushed their first e2e design project, Event Search, at Expel. From initial concept, to user research, to collaboration with PM and Eng, we couldn’t have asked for a better partner to build with. Not many UXers are gonna walk in off the street and stick the landing on a search feature from scratch of the most complex data Expel has.” - Expel Engineering Manager

The earliest iterations of this feature used a modal for the search, so that you could search from any page; however, after testing this flow, I pivoted to an inline component for the search parameters on a dedicated page.

The second iteration of this feature had the search parameters across the top, with results appearing in a card structure that’s used elsewhere in Workbench. Feedback proved that this was confusing for users, since they associated these cards with existing components - so I switched to the table in the final version that you see above.

A screenshot of the research report that I put together after usability testing - this was the first time I used this format with the 5-min digest at the top, and got such good feedback on it that I’ve used it for all reports since then.

After user research, I wanted to ensure it was clear to the engineering team what the changes were that we were making. This screenshot shows how I formatted my Figma file.