Driving with Research
Goal: Respond to user demand for "better reporting", understanding what that meant, and delivering it.
My Roles: Researcher, Product Designer
Impact: Helped close several large sales. Recognized by Gartner.
Compliance Reporting for Ivanti Neurons
Situation
While doing a round of usability testing for Patch for Neurons, one common refrain came out: better reporting.
Of course, that’s true of every system on the market today.
But I asked – “what kind of reporting? What do you need it to do?”
And the most common feedback was “something I can take to my manager to show her that I’m in compliance”. The system main goal wasn’t just a healthy network; it was also proving to their management, and in some cases their regulators, that they had a healthy network.
Task
sing a (now patented) system that kicked off “inventory scans” (scans triggered on “agents” on computers) after frequent system events, devise a report that would provide near-real-time visibility into the compliance level of all or part of the network.
“Compliance” in this case was defined as the percentage of a set of devices that are patched to the level the organization requires to be compliant. The desired or required compliance level varies by service level agreements (SLAs), company policy and industry and government regulation, but is frequently a level above 95% over time.
It’s esoteric. It’s also what system administrators, IT security managers and CSOs talk about during their performance reviews.
Task
sing a (now patented) system that kicked off “inventory scans” (scans triggered on “agents” on computers) after frequent system events, devise a report that would provide near-real-time visibility into the compliance level of all or part of the network.
“Compliance” in this case was defined as the percentage of a set of devices that are patched to the level the organization requires to be compliant. The desired or required compliance level varies by service level agreements (SLAs), company policy and industry and government regulation, but is frequently a level above 95% over time.
It’s esoteric. It’s also what system administrators, IT security managers and CSOs talk about during their performance reviews.
Actions
Once the actual user requirement became apparent during the usability tests, the design fell into place fairly quickly; create an interaction allowing the user to:
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Select all, or a subset, of their organization’s devices.
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Select the set of patches that defined “complete” for the organization. This could be defined by a Change Control Board, a government regulatory body, contractual obligations or any other reason.
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Find a way to display the level of compliance over time – both in raw terms, and normalized to account for rollouts of large numbers of patches.
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The result was a visual report that allowed the user to view their level of compliance at any desired time slice – showing both compliance itself, and trends in the level of compliance. (Figure 5)As such, it served as both a report on results and, as an integral part of the patching workflow, a call to action when compliance was slipping. We specifically reinforced the “call to action” use case by adding a small version of the compliance sparkline in the list view, to facilitate scanning through what can otherwise be a maze of text.
The Compliance Report.
The horizontal axis is time – up to 15 months.
The vertical axis is compliance level.
The sparkline (wavy in this mockup) is the compliance level of a particular date.
The horizontal line is the desired compliance level.
It tells a senior admin manager everything they need to know – in this case, time to figure out what the problem is…
The list of a user’s compliance reports. Note that we included a row-high version of the sparkline, to help rthe user scan for problem reports without needing to either open reports or pick numbers out of a maze of data.
Results
Compliance Reporting was added to Patch for Neurons in January 2023. It rolled out to widespread industry acclaim, being recognized by the Sales staff and by Gartner.
While I don’t have revenue figures, the feature was pivotal in a number of high profile sales.
It’s also the subject of several patents and applications