Digital Overhaul for Cybersecurity Training & Certification
In order to grow its customer base and reposition itself in the market, a cybersecurity training company needed help defining and validating a strategy for a new website as well as consolidating, updating, and migrating its over 100,000 pages of web content onto the new site.
As a global pillar within cybersecurity, the client needs to reach and speak to the global cybersecurity community. The company’s mission is to empower the cybersecurity community through formal training as well as access to free tools and resources covering best practices, industry knowledge, industry research, and real-time active threat monitoring.
The client had previously successfully focused on non-digital sales and marketing channels, with some business units independently defining and adopting their own digital strategies. A primary goal of this endeavor was to create a unified user experience and brand identity rooted in user needs and mental models.
This was a fully interdisciplinary web project with design, web development, solutions architecture, marketing, content strategy, and user research represented. The project required balancing priorities between technical, design, and knowledge debt.
I used a variety of methods from formative and generative research through to summative validation with a mix of quantitative and qualitative. Most in-person research centered around the client’s numerous live training events held in cities around the world. Performing research at these events streamlined participant recruiting by allowing us to tap into the client’s user database to prescreen for essential criteria. It also eased scheduling and logistics burden. Researching in context allowed us to understand the learning environment and culture.
I was the only researcher. To meet the demand for research, I created a research ops practice consisting of process documentation and scaffolding, training, and oversight that allowed me to scale research across eight other team members.
Project Objective
Shore up the world’s defenses against cyber crime by defining and refining an engaging and usable website experience for a leading global cybersecurity training and certification provider
My Role
-
Content Strategy Lead
​
-
User Research Lead
​
-
Research Operations Lead
​
-
Workshop Design & Facilitation
​
-
Stakeholder Management
Key User Profiles
-
Existing learners in client’s ecosystem
​
-
The global cybersecurity community
​
-
Content and program sponsors
​
-
Client stakeholders (mainly Sales & Marketing)
Methods
&
Tactics
-
Research Process Management
-
Formative User Interviews
-
Usability Testing
-
Surveys
-
Guerilla User Research
-
Analytics
-
Tree Testing
-
Stakeholder Workshops
-
Content Audit & Migration Plan
Research Approach
I defined a user research process for the whole engagement, leveraging analytics and web-based data sources to augment the insights coming out of moderated user research and stakeholder workshops. My goal was to provide the design team and stakeholders with evidence to inform choices in an iterative way, always tossing the final say to what users need and how they make decisions. A key part of this 10-month engagement was making sure we built consensus among our diverse set of stakeholders. I developed and led workshops to achieve this.
While choosing methods and defining research protocols, I trained and managed eight client and internal team members across design, analytics, project management, and development to gather data and conduct research.
​
Using a variety of different methods to answer research questions, I started with formative research during discovery and moved into validation testing before code release, defining experience success criteria to aid in engineering QA.​​
Contextual Inquiries
User Surveys
User Interviews
Tree Tests
Generative Usability Tests
Generative Usability Tests
Validation Usability Tests
Analytics Review
Stakeholder Interviews
Stakeholder Workshops
Capstone Workshop
Card Sorts
Stakeholder Workshops
Card Sorts
Stakeholder Workshops
Code
Prototyping
Wireframing
Concepting
Discovery
What I enjoyed about this project
As the sole user researcher on a multi-year website overhaul project, I got to build out research operations, scaling for capability needs by leveraging client and internal staff across analytics, solutions, development, design, marketing, and project
management. Having other team members involved in research created increased understanding and appreciation of the research process and the impact of its outputs.
I had the latitude to use a variety of research methods and approaches. This gave me ability to draw together multiple lines of evidence for more complex longitudinal research questions. Not only did user research serve as the user’s proxy, it
also became the voice of objectivity when working with a massive group of stakeholders with, at times, contradicting opinions.
Finally, I also appreciated the mission-driven focus of the client. Despite being a for-profit endeavor, the organization’s prime directive is to “fight the bad guys” by empowering the cybersecurity security with knowledge and tools.
​
For some related work samples, check out excerpts from a process presentation deck, and excerpts from user research reports.
