CybSafe, Workshop modules

Client
CybSafe
Role
Product Designer
Timeframe
Aug 2024 – Sep 2024

CybSafe helps security teams manage human cyber risk in their organisations. Its training modules in particular were praised for their engaging written content. However, customers grew bored with their static format and started looking for more modern alternatives.

I led the discovery and design for a new interactive format for modules called 'workshops'. The prototype excited customers and unblocked CybSafe's launch with a high-profile channel partner.

Highlights

The prototype for a new 'workshop' module format that encourages active user engagement.

How it went

🔓 Unblocked launch

In an international market

🤝 Stronger partnership

With a key channel partner

✅ Industry standard met

For CybSafe's modules

🤩 Excitement

Among internal stakeholders

Process

Background

Who uses CybSafe?

In general there are two main user groups who interact with CybSafe, albeit in different places.

🧑‍💻 Admins

Security professionals who manage the CybSafe platform on an organisation's behalf.

🧑 Users

Employees who interact with the CybSafe platform as decided by admin.

Core product: GUIDE

GUIDE is one of CybSafe's three core products. It gives admins a way to provide personalised help and assistance to users, based on their characteristics and behaviours. This guidance can come in the form of advice, goals, nudges, and training modules.

Object map of GUIDE. It shows each of the core objects that make up GUIDE, along with their relationships, content, and metadata.
GUIDE object map.

Training modules

Security awareness & training (SA&T) is the traditional method for reducing cyber risk and is essential for organisations to qualify for cyber insurance. CybSafe's training modules receive universal praise for their engaging, well-written content. They each cover a specific topic and are followed by a quiz that tests users on what they've learned.

An interface showing a list of courses. Each one displays a progress bar with three modules as cards containing their details and an arrow icon to show it is clickable. Below is a link to view all modules in the course.
Users receive personalised security awareness training via the CybSafe platform.

Problem

They were boring

Despite their praise, customers and prospects alike had become uninspired by the modules. They felt that the content was too static and lacked the interactivity needed to engage their users.

A mobile screen showing one CybSafe's training modules. It features a heading saying 'Passwords and coffee' and text about the risk of using public Wi-Fi. There is also an image of two people sitting down for a coffee.
The content for CybSafe modules were primarily text and image based.

Early insights

A lot of the feedback had been shared by customer success and sales on Slack. From this, we gained some initial insights.

💸

60% of close/lost deals were related to the modules content (and the quality of their translations).

🎥

There was mixed messaging about what customers meant by 'interactivity', some just wanted more video content.

✨

Engagement seemed to be the main metric driving customer concerns about the modules.

It was a blocker

The sentiment was shared by one of CybSafe's most strategically important channel partners. So much so, that key stakeholders there said they wouldn't be able to launch CybSafe as planned in one of their international markets!

🔴

A channel partner couldn't launch CybSafe in one of there international markets until there was more interactive content.

The challenge (part 1)

The lack of interactive content was a clear business problem. What wasn't clear was what customers meant by 'interactive content'. We also didn't know if it was actually a problem for users. Our analytics showed that module completion was just under 80%, but it was unknown whether a lack of interactive content was the cause of the drop-off. We needed to investigate further.

What do customers mean when they ask for 'interactive content' and what is the root problem they are trying to solve with it?

Discovery

Initial research questions

I started by working with the content writer and user researcher to list the questions we needed answers to proceed. This acted as a guide throughout the planning stages of discovery, helping to decide which research methods to use.

Five post-it notes, each with a research question. They each aim to uncover insights about customers' challenges with the modules and lack of interactivity.
To start the discovery aimed to answer five initial questions.

Admin interviews

Based on the research questions, I wrote an interview script and used it to facilitate conversations with 6 admins. This was to better understand customers' requests for interactive content and the root problem they were trying to solve with it.

📉

Module completion can decline over time, especially for annual training, which repeat the same topics and format each year.

👆

'Interactive content' meant tactile learning where users are required to actively interact with the content.

🗂️

Participants wanted more content variety so that they had more options when giving training to users.

✅

Participants believed this would boost engagement by making the modules more fun and varied.

Channel partner call

Given their unique circumstances and strategic importance, I also joined a call with the channel partners. Their thought process was the same as customers, but their main concern was from a competitive standpoint.

📉

The channel partner wasn't confident that CybSafe would be able to compete in the market against competitors who provided more interactive training.

More questions

At this point we had a clearer understanding of the problem. But we had only heard from admins and much of it was based on their intuition. To deliver an effective solution, we'd also needed better to understand the perspectives of people who interact with the modules, the users.

Nine post-it notes, each with a research question. Three of them are green and have a check in their bottom right corners. The remaining six are purple and cover questions about industry standards and effectiveness of workplace training.
The interviews answered some research questions and uncovered more.

Academic literature review

I asked the admins if I could interview some of their users about the modules. However, this wasn't possible due to privacy concerns. This was an ongoing challenge, as admins are understandably protective of users' data and time, even if they trust us.

So instead, I asked the Science & Research team if they knew of any academic studies into engagement and effectiveness of workplace training. They conducted an academic literature review and came back with several principles for effective learning.

📉

Multimodality: Information is easier to remember when shared in multiple media and sensory formats (Mayer & Pilegard, 2021).

👆

Immediate feedback: Learners benefit from feedback on their performance in a learning task (Pahler et al., 2005).

🗂️

Segmented self-paced learning: Learning is more effective when it's broken into learner-paced segments (Mayer & Pilegard, 2021).

✅

Fun, aesthetically pleasing content: (Agarwal and Karahanna, 2000; Lee and Manners, 2015).

Redefining the problem

The challenge (part 2)

Customers were worried that users would stop completing and engaging with the modules, especially mandatory annual training. If users don't complete their annual training, organisations won't qualify for cyber insurance. If users don't engage with the modules, they won't acquire or retain the knowledge and skills they need to protect themselves from cyber threats and reduce risk to the organisation.

How might we maximise user engagement and knowledge retention with the modules, while adding just enough interactivity to make them competitive in the current market?

Before we began

There were several strategic considerations with needed to keep in mind. The most important being to maintain a good relationship with the channel partner and unblock them. This meant that providing more interactive training was the top short-term priority.

⏳

We had 2 weeks to propose a solution and roadmap to the channel partner, this would decide whether the launch would remain blocked or not!

🧩

Use existing components and patterns from IBM's Carbon design system. Any new components would need approval from the Head of Design and CTO.

🧠

The modules exist to improve people's knowledge of cyber security and reduce risk. Our solution needed to emphasise knowledge and understanding as key metrics over completion.

What we did

Industry analysis

I started by conducting an analysis of some competitors and ed-tech products. Specifically how they used interactivity to enhance their training content. This gave an idea of industry standards for interactivity, which would help decide how to approach interactivity for the modules.

A table comparing the interactivity features of some of CybSafe's competitors, along with other products in the ed-tech space.
Table comparing interactivity features of competitors and ed-tech products.

Guiding principles

The desire for more interactivity was valid. So I was keen to implement in a way that helped people gain the knowledge and skills they need to protect themselves from cyber threats. I used the principles for effective learning as the main foundation of my design approach.

🔣

Use multimodality with a variety of media and interactions to help users to better learn and retain information.

✅

Provide users with immediate feedback when they interact with modules and questions.

⏱️

Allow users to complete modules at their own pace where possible, to enable them to learn from them more deeply.

🛝

Provide fun and aesthetic content to make the experience of completing modules as enjoyable as possible.

🔔

Respect users' time by understanding that they have lives and priorities outside of workplace training.

Content outline

The top priority was to unblock the channel partner. So the content designer and I decided to produce a rapid prototype for a new 'workshop' module format. While the content designer produced the necessary content, I started designing the main interactions based on a content outline we wrote together.

A Google doc outlining the structure and content of the proposed 'workshop' module.
We wrote the content outline for the prototype in a Google doc.

Workshop modules

Scenarios

Workshop modules immerse users into scenarios where they are asked to identify cyber security risks and the best ways to handle them. This encourages users to actively engage with cyber security topics, enhancing their ability to encode information.

Each scenario is presented as an image, video, or audio file.

Multimodality

The scenarios use image, video, and audio to enhance learning through multimodality. I paid special attention to audio as this wasn't covered in the Carbon design system. Taking inspiration from messaging apps, the new audio component provides a realistic and familiar interaction to users. There's also a transcript in case they can't listen to the audio.

The audio players are based on voice messages seen in messaging apps.

Immediate feedback

If users give an incorrect answer, they are immediately shown the correct one(s) and given an explanation why. The purpose of these questions isn't to test users, but to act as teachable moments when they are necessary. The user's knowledge is properly tested later after completing the module.

The in-situ questions are teachable moments, not tests.

Fun, aesthetic content

I created a few animations to provide a psychological reward when users get a question right and complete the module. This makes the modules more enjoyable overall. For the sake of speed I opted for standard silicon valley sparkles and fireworks. For the 'final' version I would revisit these with something of higher-quality and on-brand. The robot's name is Lummers by the way.

Micro-animations are intended to provide psychological rewards and enjoyment.

Segmented, self-paced content

The modules gradually reveal their content as the user completes each scenario. This prevents them from being overwhelmed with all the information at once. Their progress is also saved if they exit the module, meaning they can complete it in multiple sessions if necessary.

An idea for the future is to allow users to decide the pace they complete all their training. For example, one module per day. Then they would be reminded to complete a module each day. Some learning campaigns do have deadlines though, so we'd need to consider that.

Content is gradually revealed as the user progresses through the module.

Obligatory aside about gamification

Gamification is often suggested to boost engagement, with Duolingo being cited a key example of its success. However, while users choose to use Duolingo, they often use CybSafe because they're required to. So we had to be intentional about which elements to include, if any.

🧠 My thinking

This came down to respecting users' time. Our goal was to enhance their cognitive engagement with their security training, not inflate interactions or logins. So I prioritised hassle-free elements like progress bars and psychological rewards. Other elements like achievements, leaderboards, and challenges are better suited for encouraging strong naturally occuring security behaviours.

Impact

Excitement all round

The prototype was very well received by customers. One noted it wasn’t groundbreaking but now met industry standards, as intended. It also generated excitement internally when I showed it at an all-hands, with several people messaging me after to express interest in the project.

The partner was also happy. Enough so that they agreed to move forward with their originally planned launch date, as the first set of new modules would be ready by then. Their lead also thanked us for how well we responded to the situation, saying that we treated it like a true partnership.

🔓 Unblocked launch

In a key international market

🤝 Stronger partnership

With a key channel partner

✅ Industry standard met

For CybSafe's modules

🤩 Excitement

Among internal stakeholders

Next steps

Due to CybSafe's own priorities, the rest of project wouldn't start until January 2025. However, it was still scheduled to finish well before the partners planned launch. Our plan was to produce 8 workshop modules, covering the core cyber security topics necessary for compliance. I also liaised with the engineers to scope out the work required to support the new module format.

Spreadsheet showing the project timeline for workshop modules. It spans from 6th January to 31st March.
Project timeline shown to stakeholders and the channel partner.

Unexpected ending

Unfortunately, just as we were about to pick the project back up, my role was part of a round of redundancies. So this is where the project ended, for me at least. I made sure to leave enough documentation for the team that remained to pick it up.

Retrospective

It was a shame that the project was cut short. However, I was satisfied with where I had left things off. I'm also pleased to have been able to work on this project, especially for what I personally gained from it.

🔎

A great discovery and user research project that helped me gain more experience planning and leading such initiatives.

🤝

Channel partners are stakeholders not just another type of customer. They have a vested interest in CybSafe's success too!

🧑

An opportunity to work on the user experience after spending most of my time at CybSafe on the B2B side of the product.

Thanks for reading 🙏

Next project

CybSafe, Learning campaigns
Samuel Faiers — Product Designer
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