I’m Ben

kicking a** and making games

Teaching tots how to fly

I've always wanted to make a game. To create an experience that goes beyond traditional software interactions. Experimenting with game loops and how I could blend my personal illustration style with sound and animation to create a fun and engaging experience.

I’m still working on the full game but you can test out the core game loop here.

Writing & illustrating books

Years ago, I wrote and illustrated a picture book, The Three Pirate Pigs. I initially set out to share it with friends and family, but positive feedback led me to explore the world of self-publishing. During my sabbatical, I re-illustrated that first book (coming out soon) and released a second book, Food Fight Fisticuffs, under the pen name Benjamin Boos.I've sold several hundred copies through local bookstores, art fairs, Amazon, and through my e-commerce website. This has been an incredible learning experience, and has left me with a profound respect for sales and marketing teams.

bag it & tag it

Grouping common indicators

In order to leverage their data, security analysts needed to make complex queries with a good understanding of how the data was structured. I helped lead an effort to simplify that process by introducing a series of "risk indicators" that boiled down common queries into tags that were easier to use and understand.We started with a deep dive into our search and alerting analytics, and paired that with user interviews, to get a sense for the types of data they were interested in and how it related to the risks they were trying to mitigate. This was boiled down to three pillars of risk with dozens of indicators that could be offered out of the box with zero configuration or knowledge of the system.

Long term updates

Organizing the risk indicators was not a one-and-done situation. I continued to work with customers and internal teams to maintain and add new indicators. In fact, we were able to add a new pillar that provided the source a file was acquired from, which was an exciting piece of context.

2 + 2 = Lore

A scoring system that tells a story

Adding the risk indicators made searching for risk a lot easier, but still took the time and initiative to do it. Scoring is a standard solution across security products, but we learned that many analysts don't trust black-box math. In an effort to start simple and provide transparency, I designed a scoring system that combined our risk indicators with basic arithmetic to assign a severity and tell a story about the file event at a glance.

I worked with several teams at Code42 to roll out this new prioritization system across the product. This approach allowed analysts to access this information consistently wherever they were reviewing risk. It helped them prioritize their work, while quickly being able to recognize how risky a scenario was for their organization.

Accessible icons

Most security products rely solely on color to differentiate priority or status. I designed a set of icons using a consistent pattern of shapes along with contrast to help colorblind users assess risk quickly and easily.

Drawerification

Investigations take unique paths and start in different locations throughout the product. Jumping from page to page can impair context and flow. I led a company-wide effort to implement drawers across the product to keep access to data consistent and predictable wherever it was accessed.

If you build it, alerts will come

An approachable rule builder

Alerts are an important part of a security tool. The more data you have, the harder it is to maintain actionable, proactive notifications. I led an effort to design a new rule builder that leveraged the different facets of our risk scoring system into an interface that was easy to configure and manage.Traditional rule builders require complex forms with explicit criteria and can be hard to fully understand their effectiveness, especially for less experienced analysts. My designs leveraged a simple approach that only required the user to select the indicators they were primarily interested in. When paired with a critical status indicator, an organization would only be notified when a file event contained other high-risk indicators. All without having to specify additional indicators individually.

Functional feedback

When developing a machine learning model to recommend alerts, I designed a feedback system to gather more training data by framing it around actions that users were already taking.

take it on the road

Go to where the people are

Conferences in the security industry are well attended. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for us to tap into a rich audience where we could distribute surveys, conduct usability testing, and create a list of candidates that wanted to give feedback in the future. At the time, our marketing department was putting together a Code42-sponsored event in San Francisco. I worked closely with the conference team to create space and promotion for a booth we called "UX Labs".The results were beyond our expectations. Within the first hour of the conference, we were able to fill up all of our usability testing slots, and we opened up a second testing room to accommodate the demand. At the end of the conference, we had more than enough usability testing results, almost half of the attendees stopped to fill out surveys, and we were able to meet our sign-up goals.

Analogous studies

When we needed feedback quickly,
I began experimenting with
analogous versions of the interfaces we created to engage a more general audience. This allowed us to take advantage of large pools of testers available through services like Lyssna.