Perch Security

Perch is a co-managed threat detection and response platform backed by an in-house security operations center (SOC). We built Perch to be flexible, scaling to any size business and tailored to fit your specific needs.

Perch detects known threats on your network and host, with analysts monitoring your alerts 24/7.  Connect to all of your threat intelligence sources. Store your logs for compliance. Access everything through a central application.

My role

2016 - 2021 (4 YRS)

I came onboard during the company's inception to lead design efforts on the product side. Cyber security is a growing and complex market that I want to make more intuitive and fun. Startup life is fast paced and hard work, but it is highly satisfying to create successful applications that our clients love to use.

My focus is on our flagship Community Defense App, but have other products in the works. Our products utilize Google's material design and usability patterns. All are primarily for desktop but also provide mobile experiences for our users.

I also use my experience to provide assistance where necessary, including product management and new feature management and marketing assistance.

Core Design Process

1. Define (goals)

2. Empathize (research)

3. Ideate (wireframes)

4. Prototype (high-fidelity)

5. Learn (test, launch, validate)

6. Repeat (any)

Product Process

1. Define (as a team)

2. Design ( 👈🏻 design process)

3. Handoff (design to dev)

4. Build (test, internal)

5. Launch (public)

6. Refine (iterations)

We started with nothing more than idea. We spent a lot of time white boarding and talking through concepts, patterns and flows. Eventually moving into wireframes and high fidelity prototypes. At the end of 2016 we launched a prototype for our customers to play with.

Learning

We value the feedback of our customers. Even today we have open lines of communication for our users to contact us openly via Slack. We also hold monthly user meetings where we employ our users to freely talk to us about their needs and pain points.

When we were small, we didn’t have many customers but our largest user base is internal in our security operations center (SOC). They still remain our largest user base today.

This puts us in a fortunate situation because as our internal team has no qualms over voicing their opinions - good or bad.

Repeating

We were constantly making small improvements throughout the app as we pushed through those first few years. Most features were defined by the needs of our users; internal and external.

Milestones & pivots

Managed Service Providers

Today, our largest clients are our managed service providers. As mentioned, our SOC is our largest user base and they essentially act as a MSP for our clients which created a special type of user that we started to focus on.

Pivoting our focus to cater towards MSPs not only helped our internal team but gave us a new selling point for Perch.

We focused on improving our dashboard to aggregate information for all the organizations you manage whereas previously we could only view a single organization at a time. However we still wanted it to be easy for users to drill down to view a single customer if needed.

This step provided better insight and reports as well as improved our onboarding.

MSP homepage 2019 (gif)

Marketplace - From product to platform

Launching the marketplace was a significant feature and milestone for Perch as we transform into a platform for our customers.

Our marketplace allows our users to share the things they have created within the app such as their own dashboards, visualizations and saved searches.

Most importantly the marketplace gives Perch a way of sharing groups of add-ons and integrations (eg. “collections”) that cater towards our specific types of users.

For example, our Office 365 collection includes the integration itself as well as all content related and designed to enhance your experience with this integration.

Marketplace for MSPs

This was a powerful new tool for our MSPs giving them more control over the clients they managed as well as speeding up onboarding. By utilizing the collections in the marketplace they could install everything their client needs all at once; to one or many clients in a single click.

Marketplace - early 2020

Our design system

Google Material Design and Material-UI.com

Way back in the beginning the original team was familiar with Google’s design system and we decided to utilize material-ui.com out-of-the-box React components for rapid prototyping both on the design and development side.

As we grew, so did our components and our library. Today we have a unique system stemming from MUI with the addition of custom components to create a system unique to Perch and our products.

Global library

As we grew, we branched the library outward so that assets that applied to Perch design as a whole. This eliminated any stress or worry if a color or logo was updated slightly. All the newest components and styles trickle down into your latest design.

Perch Today

The following is just a taste of how the app looks today and what is currently being worked on. The team is constantly making improvements to the Perch platform. 

Home page

The later half of 2020 involved reworking out home page. Instead of throwing a lot at the user, as we’ve done previously, we give them bite sized pieces and allow them to easily navigate where they need to be.

Clicking on high level statistics show a “peak” at the data behind it. From there, the user can easily dive into where they need to be.

We currently have a handful of different customer and user types so it was important to create a page that was dynamic. A card based approach allowed for us to not only present high level data in bite sized pieces but also to dynamically show/hide without disrupting the flow of the page.

This new homepage also offers better insight into anything needing attention within the app (eg. if an integration was producing an error). It also allows for smoother onboarding as we are better at recognizing what the customer has purchased and what they are trying to set up.

Dark mode

Oh and we also have dark mode because everyone loves dark mode 🌚.

Reflection 🤔

Working with a product from inception - when it’s literally just a drawing on a napkin - is damn tough.

At the end of the day, it’s like my baby. When things go right and people are happy - I couldn’t be more proud.