How cybersecurity’s user experience transformation is empowering organizations to outpace evolving threats

A Post-RSA 2025 Cyber UXcellence Awards Feature

Picture this: A cyberattack is underway. Your security analyst stares at a dashboard that looks like someone detonated a rainbow in a data center. Red alerts blink alongside orange warnings, while purple notifications compete with green status indicators. Somewhere in this Christmas tree of chaos lies the information needed to stop the breach.

The analyst clicks. Scrolls. Squints. Clicks again.

The attack spreads.

This nightmare scenario plays out daily across corporate America, where brilliant security tools fail not because they lack sophistication, but because they’re impossible to use when it matters most. But a quiet transformation is brewing in the halls of RSA Conference 2025, led by product leaders who’ve committed to transforming bad UX.

“Don’t make the dashboard look like a Christmas tree,” says Baber Amin, Chief Product Officer at Anetac, and he’s deadly serious. In cybersecurity, cognitive overload isn’t just annoying. It’s dangerous.

When Good Analysts Go Bad (Because of Bad Design)

Here’s what keeps security leaders up at night: They’ve hired brilliant analysts, deployed cutting-edge tools, and built fortress-like defenses. Yet breaches still happen because their own interfaces are sabotaging their teams.

“There’s a tendency in this space to just throw data at the user,” admits Peter Kazmir  Director of Product Management at Anvilogic. He’s seen analysts paralyzed by screens packed with so much information that finding the actual threat becomes like spotting Waldo in a cybersecurity textbook.

The problem compounds in Security Operations Centers, where experience levels range from fresh graduates to grizzled veterans. Luke Fritz, Senior Director of Product Management at Stellar Cyber, faces this challenge daily. “Striking that balance to not alienate your junior analysts or inundate senior analysts with irrelevant information is the key to striking that balance,” he explains.

The solution sounds simple: interfaces that adapt to user expertise. But it’s incredibly complex to build while analysts are actively hunting threats.

The Color-Coded Catastrophe

Baber Amin has witnessed the carnage of over-designed security interfaces firsthand. His philosophy cuts through the visual noise that plagues most cybersecurity dashboards: “If you’re using more than three colors, you’re going to have to put a legend somewhere. That’s cognitive overload.”

This isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about survival. When seconds count during an incident response, every visual element should either help or get out of the way. Amin champions white space and progressive disclosure, stripping away everything that doesn’t directly serve the analyst’s mission.

His team has learned that simplicity isn’t just a design preference in security. It’s a functional requirement for making life-or-death decisions under pressure.

The AI Mirage: When Robots Make Everything Worse

Enter artificial intelligence, the supposed savior of overwhelmed security teams. Except there’s a problem: Most AI implementations in cybersecurity are like giving a race car to someone who can’t drive stick shift.

Peter Kazmir’s team learned this the hard way when building AI capabilities into their SIEM platform. “We want to make sure that those agents are part of the workflow that the user wants to follow… helping the agent do their job better, rather than trying to do their job for them,” he explains.

The insight is profound: AI should feel like a really smart colleague sitting next to you, not a black box making decisions you can’t understand or control.

Beth McDaniel, Vice President of Product Management at InnerActiv takes this philosophy even further. Her team recently introduced confidence scoring to AI recommendations, essentially teaching machines humility. “It’s tempting to automate everything, but judgment still matters,” she says. When dealing with insider threats and data loss prevention, the stakes are too high for blind trust in algorithms.

But AI isn’t just changing how security tools work. It’s revolutionizing how they’re built. Jacob Wagh, Director of Product Management at SpyCloud discovered AI’s secret superpower isn’t replacing humans, it’s accelerating human creativity. His team uses AI tools like v0, Bolt, and Colllude to generate design prototypes rapidly. “It’s like having a design assistant I can talk to,” he says, though he emphasizes that human feedback and user interviews remain irreplaceable.

The Dashboard Whisperer

Speaking of Jacob Wagh, he might be the only person alive who’s made peace with security dashboards. “Dashboards are… love and hate,” he admits with the weary tone of someone who’s seen too many data visualization crimes.

His breakthrough came from studying actual user behavior rather than designer assumptions. Using behavioral analytics tools like Pendo, his team discovered that investigators were ignoring fancy summary charts and diving straight into raw data tables. So they did something radical, they rebuilt the entire interface around that reality.

The result? A dashboard that finally worked the way analysts actually think, not the way designers thought they should think. Sometimes the best UX innovation is getting out of your users’ way.

The Simplicity Rebels

While everyone else adds features, Tomer Elias, Senior Director of Product Management at Human Security is staging a rebellion against complexity. His radical philosophy can be summed up in three words: “Keep it simple.”

Working with design partners and early adopters, his team has eliminated customization overload, defaulting to smart configurations instead of endless options. They prototype with modern tools, getting rough concepts in front of users fast. The goal isn’t to give users every possible tool. It’s to give them exactly what they need when they need it.

This philosophy extends to unexpected corners of security organizations. Ankur Chadda, Director of Product Marketing at Netskope, has become an unlikely UX advocate by tracking something most teams ignore: interaction friction. “If you increase the number of clicks from one to three… that might already be a bit too much,” he warns.

His insight cuts to the heart of security UX: When you’re racing against an active threat, every unnecessary click costs precious time.

The Empathy Engine

Here’s where the story gets counterintuitive: The best security UX doesn’t come from understanding technology. It comes from understanding people under pressure.

Annia Chen, UX Manager at Stellar Cyber, puts it perfectly: “Even though the users are technical, they still want things to be easy.” This shouldn’t be revolutionary, but in an industry that often mistakes complexity for sophistication, it absolutely is.

Her team uses “product trios” – tight collaboration between product managers, UX designers, and engineers – to ensure every feature gets human perspective from day one. They also run customer advisory boards and deploy analytics that flag friction points in real workflows.

The payoff came in an unexpected place: a simple visual theme update that generated immediate positive customer response, proving that even small design improvements can create massive engagement boosts.

The Trust Protocol

But here’s the ultimate challenge because in cybersecurity, wrong decisions don’t just frustrate users, they can destroy companies. So how do you build interfaces that inspire confidence in high-stakes moments?

Beth McDaniel’s answer is radical transparency. Instead of hiding algorithmic complexity behind clean interfaces, her team surfaces it thoughtfully. Their confidence scoring system doesn’t just say “this looks suspicious.” It explains the reasoning and certainty level behind each assessment.

“You still have to be able to get to that data,” she emphasizes. When analysts understand how their tools think, they make better decisions about when to trust them and when to dig deeper.

The Revolution Will Be User-Friendly

As RSA 2025’s halls emptied and product leaders returned to their teams, the message was unmistakable: The cybersecurity industry is undergoing a fundamental shift. The winners won’t be the companies with the most sophisticated algorithms or the biggest datasets. They’ll be the ones whose tools actually help humans think clearly under pressure.

Baber Amin captures the stakes perfectly: “If the end user is not adopting good cybersecurity practices, we have all failed.” The algorithms don’t matter if people can’t use them effectively. The AI doesn’t matter if it confuses more than it clarifies. The threat intelligence doesn’t matter if it’s presented in ways that overwhelm rather than illuminate.

The cybersecurity UX transformation isn’t about making things prettier. It’s about making the people who protect us more effective. In a world where attackers are getting smarter and faster, that might be the most important innovation of all.

Ultimately, the biggest breakthrough in cybersecurity will come from tools designed to help users stay calm and focused under pressure. It’s a shift already underway as design teams and partners like Mindgrub work alongside cybersecurity leaders to build interfaces that cut through complexity, reduce friction, and turn high-stakes moments into opportunities to respond with clarity and confidence.

For companies like Mindgrub, which has extensive experience helping cybersecurity companies improve their UX and UI, this shift represents a critical evolution in the industry. The same principles that make consumer apps intuitive and engaging apply to enterprise security tools, but the stakes are fundamentally different. In cybersecurity, poor UX doesn’t just frustrate the users. It can leave organizations vulnerable.

Because somewhere right now, an analyst is staring at a screen, racing against time to stop an attack. The question that will determine the outcome isn’t about processing power or detection algorithms. It’s whether their interface will help them win or get in their way.

The answer increasingly determines who succeeds in cybersecurity.

Mindgrub’s Cyber UXcellence Awards recognize teams that are rethinking how thoughtful design can amplify security effectiveness. Submissions are still open until 11:55 pm EST on July 10th, 2025  If your team is part of this transformation, now’s the time to showcase your work.