Making web browsing safer for families

K9 Web Protection was a created by Blue Coat Systems to users with low levels of technical expertise - parents, grandparents, small business owners - set up safe surfing for their families, businesses, and themselves. Originally released in 2006, the application was in need for an update to improve overall usability and modernize the UI.

Challenge

Given the target audience, K9 needed to offer a simple, easy-to-use, and browser-agnostic experience. More importantly, however, K9 needed to guide consumers through decision-making in an area that they might have limited expertise about.

Additionally, the appearance of the application was perceived as "dated" and "old", which was negatively impacting the perceived trustworthiness among K9 users and needed to be updated. At this time, Blue Coat Systems didn't have a cross-product style guide but this was an excellent opportunity to create one.

A couple of K9 screens, circa early 2012

Process

The process was fast-paced and iterative, driven by multi-modal research, and validated via feedback collected from rapid prototyping. Based on the findings of these activities, we decided to update the application's navigation, simplify workflows, and modernize and clean up the user interface (UI).

K9's old and updated information architecture (IA)

Solution

In an effort to clean up K9’s navigation, a dropdown user menu was included to contain links that fell outside the K9’s core features. Labels were updated to use descriptive plain-language copy to support better recognition.

K9's redesigned home page showing the updated navigation and new dropdown menu

K9’s visual identity was updated to modernize the look and feel. To reflect the recent rebranding of Blue Coat, we also took this opportunity to redesign the K9’s logo.

Bluecoat's brand and K9's logo - Old on the left and new on the right

Content and layout were updated across screens to reduce cognitive overload so that users could accomplish their goals without feeling overwhelmed.

K9's redesigned online activity summary page

Outcome

A clickable high-fidelity prototype was used to test the redesign with 12 users, each of whom completed a set of 3 tasks. We saw a drop in task completion time and error rates, a healthy increase in success rates, and an average score of 4.5/5 in a simple satisfaction survey ("how satisfied were you with using this application?").

Business Value

K9 was the first application redesigned as a part of a larger effort to improve and modernize UX of Blue Coat's products. In a sense, it was a test of whether an enterprise-focused engineering-led company could create an application that non-technical consumers found easy to use.

The reception of the re-design of K9 led to the product management team kicking off initiatives to revisit and modernize the UX of the company's flagship products and even create a new product with a sleek yet informative experience targeted towards C-level audiences.

How I Led

K9 was one of the first consumer-focused products that I worked on. Having primarily designed B2B SaaS applications until that point, working on this initiative was a demonstration to the company (and myself) that thorough research to gain a rich understanding of the user's needs was central to any good user experience.

Based on the research phase, I identified several opportunities to improve the experience of K9, including the concept of demographic-based “profiles” - for example, those below the age of 18 may need restrictions around access to explicit sexual content or contact with strangers whereas those above the age of 65 may need more protection from malware, phishing sites, and online scams. These were added to the product roadmap for K9 as well as the new C-level dashboard-centric product mentioned above.

Additionally, I led a cross-functional effort to create an official style guide for Blue Coat's UIs which, over the next 2 years, was adopted by the entire portfolio of products.