Introduction
Actually similar question has been asked several times to me earlier.
Why UI/UX plays important role in the IT Security Industry?
Software as a product should have been beautiful. iPhone is beautifully designed. It wasn’t the first phone ever, but through its splendor ness, humans got more and more ideas on how to explore and utilize technology out of a cell phone. Something that other prodigies such as Nokia and Ericsson somehow couldn’t see before the 2007 era.
One of the reasons behind good user interface design and experience is because of the rate at which our brain processes different sensations. It takes approximately 1/10 of a second to understand a photo while reading 200 words takes approximately 60 seconds. That means, the human brain process input captured from visualization faster compared to input taken from text/words.
IT Security is a complex matter. Security events are ingested every day from various different machines, apps, and data. It doesn’t make any more sense whenever a Security Engineer has to utilize an old traditional approach when dealing with IT Security incidents.
Intuitive data visualization helps humans understand the incident faster and helps humans to plan not only remediation but also mitigation/prevention for the future. By cutting the process from 60 seconds to 1/10 of a second, humans can have a lot of extra time to analyze the more complicated and prioritized tasks at work.
Let’s see the below example of how data processed by components such as Suricata is ingested and processed into security alerts and enriched with other components.
The scale of cybersecurity threats is growing. It forces humans to understand the context of “what’s going on” in a matter of seconds (less than 5 seconds).
Not every organization is lucky enough to have many prodigies IT security experts on their team. However, the IT security people must be scaled up along with the growth of security incidents produce by machines and applications. It is very important that security incidents are presented in a very intuitive form so any level of IT security people can understand the context — from new fresh graduates up to the executive level in the organization.
Data — Human Intuition
Increasing the product value through human intuition is also an important reason why good intuitive UI/UX is required in Cybersecurity products. Have a look at the following Data Framework.
Extracting values from the lakes of data can use above data framework. While AI and automation are important, in the end, it is always the HUMAN who defines what — and — how to extract more valuable information from the data.
One insight produces another insight. The cycle can gain more and faster benefits from intuitive data visualization.
Human intuition plays a critical role to add more values such as defining new kinds of data to be collected
However, intuition depend on how good we implement the Interaction phase. Without proper features such as Intuitive-Interactive-Dashboard, humans would have difficulties validating the result and formulating new initiatives or strategies for the next data collection.
That’s why, a proper, correct, and beautifully designed user interface experience is important. It is there to help humans understand the values behind collected cybersecurity events/threats of data.
Based on these two reasons (amongst others), a proper, good, and beautiful UI/UX design is very important, especially in Cybersecurity products :)
