KINGBO JAN

CANARY

My Story

  1. Why did this project come about?

  1. Canary as the SOC team

  1. What's the problem.

  1. Designing an experience for everyone.

  1. The prototype.

  1. Reflection & What's Next?

Security — for Everyone!

ROLE

Full-Stack Designer

TIMELINE

Dec 2024 - Jan 2025

TOOLS

Figma & Notion

Often time, there are IT teams in charge of maintaining the security posture of a network.

Large corporations and businesses have SOC (Security Operation Center) teams…


Individual homes can purchase anti-virus softwares…

But with more and more high-rise condos and apartments being built today…

Who's securing the shared infrastructures of these residential buildings from cyber attacks?

CHALLENGE:

How can I provide the similar protection for residential buildings without having a enterprise-level SOC team?

Big Emphasis that guided my vision:

  • Make security easier to understand.

Bringing awareness to shared building infrastructure

By blending a combination of Tier-Based Status, and a Community Awareness Dashboard, Canary aims to make security more easier to understand and foster a sense of responsibility within residential buildings

Tier-Based Status

Safe, Suspicious and Danger — to allow users to quickly assess their situation at a glance

SOLUTION:

Community Awareness Dashboard

Security should not just be a one person job — bring awareness to the entire residential community

Norton Home Security

Offers robust antivirus protection and threat detection for individual devices.


Covers wide range of security tools like VPN, threat detection, etc

Strengths

Limited guidance for complex systems.


Focuses solely on individual networks and devices

Provide real-time monitoring of network connections


Clear visibility of connected devices on a network

Fing

Strengths

Weaknesses

"These tools are just too complex to navigate, I don't even know where to start."

From this, I realized that:


  1. There is a lack of community for the non-technical users.

  2. There are no real protection for residential apartments.

  3. Many cannot navigate the complexity of security systems.

Through Feature Prioritization, it led to answers and these design decisions…

RESEARCH

Understanding the problem.

Through simulated interviews and surveys with individuals of varying technical fluency, I aimed to understand how they perceive cybersecurity tools and whether (and how) they take steps to protect their networks.

And this is how it led me to question…


How can we help users to be more accountable in security protection?

How might we maintain security posture of apartment buildings without a dedicated IT team?

How can we make security more user-friendly?

"Honestly, even if I want to learn to do this, I need someone to do it with me or I am just going to forget to do it."

"My son just helped me installed antivirus softwares on our computers and phones."

I conducted some competitive analysis because to understand what tools were out there and what is lacking…

that along with some research guided me

How can we hold users both accountable and engaged in security protection?

By adding reports within a community dashboard with interactive upvote and downvote buttons, we allow residents to filter between relevance and urgency

Designing a non-technical, user-friendly experience.

The goal of these design decisions is to make security manageable and user-friendly for users of all technical literacy while prioritizing the non-technical users to feel like they are not left in the dark.

DESIGN

Adding some little "Did you know's" can keep users engaged and gradually learn about protection

Report Upvote/Downvotes

Tips and tricks

How can we make security more easier to assess and understand?

A quick and simple scan tells you what you need to know in seconds!

*From no scans to a safe scan with a prompt to scan again

*From no scans to a danger scan with a prompt to protect network

Putting it all together and we have this…

PROTOTYPE.

Prototype Showcase.

A quick showcase of where each of the elements fit into the app as a whole.

This is the first end-to-end concept project I did under a stricter timeline of one month. Through various iterations of features to showcase on my portfolio, this challenged me to think more in a storytelling method rather than just laying out all the presentation slides. From this I learned…


  • …the importance of staying organized, adapting quickly, and prioritizing tasks in order to maintain progress.


  • …that leveraging AI tools to help with research can boost inspiration and efficiency to streamline my UX process


  • …that creating a sense of community requires balancing openness and safety, making sure residents feel empowered to share without worrying about information.

REFLECT.

Reflection & What's Next?

Thanks for reading my case study.

In the near future, I have some plans to keep adding different features to potentially make this a usable product. I have started the implementation of different features like:


  • Phishing Detection

  • Admin mode


… and more.


However, in order to make this a usable product, there will have to be more technical implementations on the backend that I will but have yet to learn so keep a look out for that! :)

WHAT'S NEXT?

Want to see more?