At Virtru, I led the user experience efforts for file protection and security. Some of my main objectives were:

To improve the ability to encrypt and share files in Google Drive
Provide an encryption solution that allows persistent file protection on your desktop or when files are shared
Introduce a unique ability to request permission for access
Develop a design strategy for making our core communication functionality available as a web-based application

These are all highly complex workflows that required a lot of collaborative thought, whiteboard sketches, healthy debates, and most importantly, patience and persistence.

Heuristic Evaluations & Design Briefs

As I started to manage my line of products, I began by performing a heuristic evaluation, systematically categorizing design gaps in our products. We’d also run a few quick user studies to identify pain points, both from end-users and from sales calls. This resulted in a listing of detailed issues stack-ranked by end-user impact, severity, and level of effort to resolve.

Once I was in sync with my counterparts in product and engineering as to where the product stood, we would also start strategizing against our vision for the product’s future. We’d identify each feature and how we’d want to enhance and evolve it, and create design briefs for each one.

The Mission

I sincerely believe the mission to bring easy-to-use cyber security to the end user is an extremely important one, especially in today’s world. It’s one that definitely deserves the long hours of focus, the seemingly endless roadblocks – the trials and tribulations of developing products that are meaningful. I would not have had it any other way.

Unfacilitated User Testing

A large part of our my process includes getting a deep and thorough understanding of the user’s needs and expectation – then carving out each path and permutation of their journey through our products. Here are quick examples of the user testing process we employed for Persistent Protection. Going through these painstaking details ensure their experience is efficient, optimal, and delightful.

The Team

In a whirlwind year at Virtru, our small but capable UX team came together to bring a user-centric creative culture to our product development process that has resulted in respect from our colleagues, delightful experiences for our customers, and most definitely busy days for ourselves. As a brand new team we quickly learned to lean on each other’s strengths, as we standardized our heuristic evaluation process, built an amazingly scalable and detailed design system, mobilized user research, and put a rigid process around how we review and deliver designs. In short order, we developed a robust and transparent creative process that drove multiple product launches and feature enhancements much faster than before.

User Flows & Journey Maps

A large part of our my process includes getting a deep and thorough understanding of the user’s needs and expectation – then carving out each path and permutation of their journey through our products. I pay close attention to ensure their experience is efficient, optimal, and delightful.

Virtuoso

That’s what we called our design system. Similar to Brad Frost’s Atomic Design, we structured our system to contain Atoms (no interactions like fonts), Molecules (single interactions like buttons), and Organisms (similar to patterns). This allowed us to quickly organize and scale our library, producing consistent designs at speed.