Brief
T-Vault is an open source secrets manager which helps protect your applications. Secrets are credential information used while developing applications and are essential to prevent and face security challenges such as data breaches due to lack of regular patching and poor handling of secrets. They can also cause major roadblocks if developers are unable to access Secret keys(IDs) and values easily.

Team: Cloud Engineering

Users: Developers

Impact
Decreased the avg. session duration time by 1.53mins
Increased Search Success Rate by 70%
Decreased number of clicks to 4 (baseline avg - 6 clicks)

Role
I worked as the Lead Product Designer alongside a Lead Researcher, and a Lead Developer from the in-house team. On the client side, we worked with a Product Owner, and a Product Manager. I conducted research, built the information architecture, brainstormed with internal users, wireframed features, designed visuals and prototyped the interactions.

User Problem

Users have trouble identifying how to access the information they need because information sets are overlapping, missing or hard to understand. The site is also hard to scan, search and interact with.

• Multiple points of navigation

• Navigation pattern is hard to follow

• Search and create options get lost within the page

• Dimension of the cards pose a text limits

• More effort is required to scan and find applications

• Information is nested really deep and spread out across different pages

Screenshots of current product

• T-Mobile Developers - Cloud CoE Team

• Dev Ops/Software Managers

User Types

• Admin

• Member

Capabilities based on User Types

From our observed pain points we noticed three factors that was affecting the experience - Navigation, Content Organization, and Visual Hierarchy. Choosing 3 competing products we analyzed how they solved for the 3 factors. The three products were HashiCorp Vault (T-Vault is built on the Vault) , AWS Secrets Manager (competing product with comprehensive features to address other user goals) and Last Pass (consumer facing product with tougher adoption rates).

To create most impact in improving the user experience, we focused on laying relevant information sets together instead of separating them out by action (View and Manage as in the current system). Removing any affordances of Admin privileges for non-admin users cleaned up the UI significantly.

Navigation
Users should spend less time looking for secrets and safes

Search
Contextual search should allow users the ease and access of narrowing down search quicker

Content Reorganization
Fewer clicks to navigate between the secret, details page, and the library window

Using the insights from the pain points, comparative analysis and user feedback we detailed out features that would help the improve the user experience

MUST HAVE

• Left Navigation Panel - Condensed nav with nested layers instead of tabs

• List View - To surface more info to help the user make a decision

• Meta Data on list Item - Giving context to user so they can make decision without having to click through

• Dropdown for actions - Nesting the edit capabilities based on permission level

• Contextual Create - Will only show entities that the user has capability to create

• Admin Only - Features are shown only if user is an Admin

SHOULD HAVE

• Breadcrumbs - To track your path and jump back steps with ease

• Column Sort - To quickly filter through data

• Contextual Search - Searches only within the context of the page

NICE TO HAVE

• Notification Panel - So the user does not have to navigate to the mail client to give access or complete the step of a create process

• Tagging - Adding tags to search by keywords

• Bookmarks - Saving frequently used secrets

• Landing Page (Personal Safes)

• Safe Detail Page

• Create Safe Modal

• Assign Permissions Modal

• T-Vault Plugin Version

• Safe folder in Plugin Version

• Sharing a secret via Plugin

User Flow Mapping

Mapping of current product for Create, Read, Update, and Delete Flows. This process helped us identify the steps involved in user flows so we could simplify interactions by identifying patterns.

Screenshots - Current Product