Anzenna.ai

UX That Converts: From Demo to Deal

Led UX for a B2B cybersecurity platform, designing sales demos and user flows that helped secure the first paying customers.

2024 - 2025

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Redesigning a complex cybersecurity SaaS platform to improve data trust, usability, and customer engagement amid fast-paced startup challenges.

Anzenna.ai is a B2B SaaS platform designed to empower security teams with comprehensive insights across a wide range of cybersecurity data. When I joined as the sole UX designer, the product was in a critical phase of growth, facing significant design and operational challenges. The platform included 18+ distinct dashboards, each containing 6 to over 20 filters, managing millions of data points — making it complex and difficult for users to navigate efficiently.

In this role, I collaborated closely with founders, product manager, engineers, and sales to drive design strategy, support customer acquisition, and improve product demonstrations. My work aimed to balance immediate feature requests with deeper, strategic improvements to core user experience issues.

WHAT WE NEEDED TO FIX

Identifying critical usability and trust issues within a fragmented and complex interface.

The product’s complexity presented several key challenges:

• Each dashboard had unique, fragmented filters that varied greatly in number and type, leading to a steep learning curve and usability issues, even for experienced security engineers.

• The data itself was often incomplete or inconsistent, raising trust concerns among users.

• Previous redesign attempts simplified the UI but lost critical data details, frustrating users who relied on that information for security decisions.

• The product lacked clear alignment between sales priorities and engineering capacity, leading to frequent last-minute feature requests and slowed development.

• The Insights page, a focal point for high-risk item visualization, was underutilized and did not meet the core workflows of security teams.

How we Learned about User Needs

HOW I PROPOSED TO SOLVE IT

Designing focused visualizations and adaptive filters to simplify data exploration and improve user control.

Based on the research, I proposed a two-step redesign focused on improving data exploration and aligning with security teams’ workflows:

1. Interactive Visual Dashboards:
   Each dataset would feature clear visual summaries—such as pie charts breaking down high-risk items by relevant categories (e.g., MFA disabled by app type or employee status). This provided users with an immediate, intuitive overview.

   Additionally, the solution included showing key highlights that surfaced critical trends over time—helping users spot emerging risks and changes at a glance. This dynamic trend visualization was well received, but the engineering team encountered challenges connecting these key highlights seamlessly with each individual dataset, which slowed full implementation.

2. Proposed Faceted Filtering Concept:
To simplify navigation through complex datasets, I proposed a faceted filtering approach—where selecting one filter dynamically surfaces relevant related filters. While this concept was promising, it required further validation through card sorting to finalize the design.

The first rollout focused on delivering the enhanced Insights page with these visualizations. However, customer feedback quickly revealed the need for a more flexible, task-oriented experience. In response, the second phase prioritized enabling custom report generation, allowing security teams to tailor data views to their specific investigative or reporting needs.

Early prototypes of these features were well received by customers, who appreciated the increased control and clarity — key improvements over the prior, fragmented filtering system.

WHAT GOT IN THE WAY

Startup realities: limited engineering resources, leadership changes, and shifting priorities slowed progress.

Despite positive early feedback, several challenges impacted the project’s progress and overall product success:

• The engineering team was small and primarily contractors, limiting their product ownership and slowing feature development due to contract constraints.

• Shortly after I joined, the product manager left, creating a gap in project management and prioritization.

• Frequent, sales-driven feature requests created tension between immediate customer demands and long-term product vision.

• My efforts often involved evangelizing UX best practices among engineers, who were heavily focused on integration work and urgent bug fixes.

• These organizational and resource challenges ultimately limited the speed and scope of UX improvements.

Recognizing these constraints, I made the difficult decision to transition out of the team, seeking opportunities where I could apply my skills in a more stable environment and drive greater impact.

Why the Design Works

• Simplicity through Focus: The design strips away unnecessary clutter to highlight the most critical security risks, enabling users to quickly understand their priorities.

• Progressive Filtering: The faceted filtering system guides users step-by-step, reducing overwhelm despite millions of data points across diverse datasets.

• User-Centered: Based on research, the UI supports both seasoned security engineers familiar with complex data and new users who face a steep learning curve.

• Balancing Detail & Usability: While the interface is clean, it maintains access to deep data insights without sacrificing ease of use.