Background
Proofpoint’s Email Protection offering is the company’s flagship product. It enables a company’s Messaging Admin to define rules to block potentially malicious emails from entering its employee’s email inboxes.
The UI has grown, but not fundamentally changed since launched in 2002. My task was to redesign the product while the backend architecture moved to the cloud.
Research
I ran contextual user interviews with internal SMEs (PMs, Sales, Prof Services) and with customers to understand their pain points. Among the top were:
Really outdated UI
Key troubleshooting workflow required jumping between 2 areas of the UI
Reports look “like they were drawn with crayon.”
Design Process
Worked with PMs/Eng weekly to review and drive design ideas
Validation research on command-line style search
Meticulous data visualization and reporting
Final Result
The first initial beta launched with the improved Smart Search with the following capabilities:
Search messages AND view message details in 1 page
New command line-style language-based search
Updated reporting visualizations & data - including “Funnel slide” key graphic
Grown to 15k daily users since 2019
Command line-style search now preferred
Since then:
More Reports, Actions, Configurations added to product
