Designing Online Help for Ericsson Security Manager

Abstract

This study aimed to design the User Interface (UI) and structure the content of online help for Ericsson Security Manager (ESM), a security solution product of Ericsson. This work is inspired to overcome the challenges of the existing help documentation of ESM. User research was conducted using qualitative method of semi-structured interviews. The results of the user interviews were analyzed to create a user journey map and draw design implications. This process was supplemented with benchmarking against companies in the cyber security field for design inspiration. The online help was designed iteratively starting with wireframes and adding more details to produce an interactive prototype. The prototype consists of a homepage which includes the subsections of the online help such as ESM terminology, technical product description, change log and report issue. The online help was designed to be smoothly navigable through parallel navigation, understandable through content chunking and learnable on first use through familiarity created with external consistency. The designed online help was tested qualitatively through evaluation interviews and quantitatively through measuring the usability of the system with System Usability Scale (SUS) survey. The results of the evaluation highlight that the users were satisfied with the navigation of the help site and the content structure was found understandable. This is reflected in the achieved SUS score of 82,4 which is well above the average score of 68,0. Some outliers were noted around the topics of integration of product features and confidence in using the product. The reasons for this pattern were difficult to determine due to the absence of supporting statements from the evaluation sessions. This work could be beneficial in providing design and content structure inspiration for online help sites of products in the cyber security domain.