Towards the end of the day, I had the chance to sit down for a one-to-one session with senior UX designer Tara McAllister, who walked me through two of the projects she has worked on at Rapid7. These projects were complex and on a much larger scale than anything I am currently working on as a student; they gave me an invaluable glimpse into the depth and scope of professional UX design. Although I wasn’t fully familiar with all the technical aspects, I was able to take detailed notes and, more importantly, gain a clearer understanding of how problems are broken down, approached, and designed into effective solutions.
The first focused on the challenge of unifying two separate security alert experiences from different SaaS products into one cohesive system. This was a project that required careful analysis and problem-solving, as the goal was to create a seamless, consistent alerts experience that supported the capabilities of both products without losing clarity or functionality. She explained how the process began with object-oriented UX, comparing the objects, attributes, content, and actions that existed across the two systems. From this comparison, she was able to create a new object model that brought together the strengths of both products. A flow diagram was then developed to show how users would interact with the new system, highlighting potential roadblocks in their journey. From there, the work moved into defining use cases, which helped set the success criteria for the unified alerts experience. These were supported with low-fidelity designs that illustrated how the use cases might be satisfied in practice. She explained that these designs would be used to guide conversations with engineering teams, helping to refine requirements and make specific design decisions such as the placement of buttons and the structure of layouts. What stood out most was how much collaboration was involved beyond the initial design work. She emphasised the importance of stakeholder alignment, as projects like this require continuous review and amendments. “Negotiating” with other designers, product managers, and engineers was a key part of the process to ensure that the final solution worked not just from a design perspective but also technically and strategically.