T-Vault (T-Mobile w/ Piktorlabs)
A core product within the ecosystem of T-Mobile developer tools, designed to help developers manage secrets and tokens used to deploy digital products at breakneck speeds while staying organized
Brief
Working as the Lead UX Designer on this project, I managed and coordinated a design team of two and a front-end development team of 4. Working directly with T-Mobile CCoE Directors I managed, presented, and facilitated workshops to arrive at a knockout solution for the T-Mobile cloud ecosystem. We were asked to reimagine an internal secret management tool with the addition of 3 new integrations and the expansion of a few.T- Vault was essential tool for Cloud Engineers used across numerous digital products and experiences.
The Problem
Secrets are typically used in the development process to prevent and face security challenges such as data breaches due to lack of regular patching and poor handling of secrets. They can also cause major roadblocks if developers are unable to access Secret keys(IDs) and values easily during the development process.
Process
Our initial research included user interview and an in depth competitive analysis. We presented our findings to launch us into a number of internal workshops. We identified the opportunity in the form of "How Might We' questions and affinity mapping. Plotting each idea against a value to effort graph. Through our research we uncovered two main user groups T-Mobile developers and application managers, both with specific needs of functionality.
Solution
Our re imagined concept put the safe as the logical base for sharing and acted as the overall anchor to secret management in the system. Making the safe creation flow a critical focus of our initial concept.
Less time spent creating safes and setting associated information around them.
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Increased success rate on the first search query
Contextual search will allow users the ease and access of narrowing down even quicker instead of bundling all the various secret types together.
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Increased success rate on the first search query
A visual layout that matches our current safe structure and technical limitations while building on top of hashicorp.
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Decrease in the number of mis-clicks when navigating to the safe.Initial data showed that the number of secrets managed within T-Vault jumped nearly 50% in the course of 2 months with added integrations and improved workflows help to drive this number.
