Clarity in Cyber Risk to Build Trust
Coalition Control is a cyber risk management platform that helps policyholders, brokers, and security teams understand an organization's cyber risk posture, prioritize remediation, and take action before vulnerabilities become claims.
As the first Product Designer assigned to the newly formed Control team, I helped transform acquired attack-surface monitoring technology into a customer-facing product experience. My work included dashboard design, risk findings and remediation UX, activation flows, information architecture, navigation, product naming research, and user research to help policyholders and brokers understand complex cyber risk signals with more confidence.
Impact
~53k
Monthly Active Users
100%
Policyholder activation
56%
Invite additional users
Context
Coalition acquired BinaryEdge in 2019 to strengthen its security intelligence capabilities and integrate attack-surface monitoring into its cyber insurance and security platform.
BinaryEdge's technology continuously scanned internet-facing assets and exposed risk signals across organizations. The product opportunity was to turn that technical intelligence into a usable platform experience for Coalition policyholders and brokers.
The design challenge was not simply to display security data. It was to help users understand what the data meant, why it mattered, and what they should do next.
My Role
Senior Product Designer & Product Research Lead
A dedicated team comprising product managers, UI developers, and UX designers was established to identify tasks, discuss progress, and share achievements.
My contributions included:
- Lead product design for the Cyber Health Profile dashboard, External Findings page, navigation model, and early policyholder dashboard concepts.
- UX and interaction design for risk intelligence outputs, including organizational risk scoring, prioritized security checklists, vulnerability details, remediation guidance, FAQs, self-help videos, and support request paths.
- Product design for features such as on-demand rescanning, based on policyholder research.
- Exploration of Cyber Risk Assessment document improvements, including data visualization concepts to help policyholders understand their risk posture.
- Activation flows to introduce policyholders to Control and help them sign up for the new risk management platform.
- Product naming research that contributed to the public-facing product name, Control.
- Information architecture and navigation models to integrate Control into Coalition's broader platform.
- Experience Design Principles workshops for the Risk Management Platform.
- Design system collaboration with developers and design leadership to adopt a customizable Material UI foundation across Control and the Broker Quoting Platform.
- UX QA with developers prior to release.
- Design hiring support and mentorship for junior Product Designers.
- User research with policyholders and brokers, including interviews, card sorting, task-completion studies, journey mapping, and monthly research readouts for product, engineering, marketing, and leadership stakeholders.
The Challenge
Coalition had strong security intelligence, but policyholders and brokers needed a clearer way to use it.
Policyholders had different levels of cybersecurity fluency. Some users did not understand what their risk posture meant. Others understood the issue but did not know how to fix it or confirm whether remediation had worked.
Brokers also needed clarity. They were often the gateway to policyholders and needed to explain risk findings without damaging trust with their clients.
The team had to balance multiple needs at once:
- Make technical risk intelligence understandable to non-security users.
- Help users move from awareness to action.
- Give brokers enough context to support policyholders.
- Build a scalable platform foundation from acquired technology.
- Prioritize work in an early-stage startup environment with shifting needs and limited time.
Research and Discovery
Coalition had not yet developed a dedicated user research practice. I began conducting research with policyholders, brokers, Product Managers, and internal stakeholders to understand how users interpreted cyber risk and what they needed from the platform.
Research activities included:
- Policyholder interviews on dashboard concepts, tooltips, vulnerability details, monitoring history, and remediation support.
- Broker interviews to understand how brokers explained risk to clients and what resources they needed to preserve trust.
- Card sorting studies to understand user mental models and inform Control's information architecture and navigation.
- Task-completion studies to evaluate usability before launch.
- Journey mapping to document the policyholder experience during the first year of being insured by Coalition.
- Monthly research updates for product, engineering, marketing, and leadership teams to connect user insights with short- and long-term product development.
These research efforts helped the team move from internal assumptions to a clearer understanding of what policyholders and brokers needed to understand, trust, and act on cyber risk information.
Key Design Decisions
Design for self-help, not just risk visibility
Early research showed that users did not only need to see security findings. They needed help understanding what those findings meant and how to respond.
This led to UX patterns that connected risk findings to self-help resources, including FAQs, remediation videos, relevant blog posts, broker consultation paths, and ways to request support from Coalition's security team.
The goal was to reduce confusion and help users move from "What does this mean?" to "What should I do next?"
Make risk posture easier to understand at a glance
The Cyber Health Profile dashboard focused on helping users understand the state and direction of their organization's risk posture.
Rather than treating risk intelligence as a list of disconnected findings, the dashboard organized risk scoring, monitoring history, prioritized security actions, and vulnerability details into a clearer account-level view.
This helped policyholders and brokers understand whether the organization's security posture was improving, declining, or requiring immediate attention.
Prioritize foundational platform work before advanced features
Policyholder research surfaced a clear need for on-demand rescanning. Users who fixed a vulnerability wanted to confirm that the issue had been resolved instead of waiting for the next scheduled scan.
The feature was important, but the team had to sequence it behind foundational front-end and back-end platform work. This tradeoff helped the team build a more stable product foundation before expanding into more advanced user-requested capabilities.
Shape navigation around user mental models
Card sorting studies helped reveal how users grouped concepts such as risk posture, findings, remediation, monitoring history, and support resources.
Those findings informed the information architecture and navigation model for Control, helping the platform feel less like a technical security tool and more like an understandable risk management product.
Support brokers as a critical trust layer
Research with brokers showed that brokers were often the gateway to policyholder adoption. If brokers did not understand their clients' risk posture, they risked weakening the relationship of trust.
The team responded by building broker-facing support resources in the Broker Quoting Platform, including FAQs, remediation videos, blog posts, and support paths that helped brokers explain risk and guide policyholders more effectively.
Product Experience
Cyber Health Profile dashboard
The dashboard gave policyholders and brokers a clearer view of organizational risk posture, score movement, monitoring history, and prioritized actions.
The design goal was to make complex security intelligence more actionable without oversimplifying the seriousness of the risk.
External Findings
The External Findings experience helped users understand specific vulnerabilities, why they mattered, and what steps could be taken to reduce risk.
The page connected technical findings to remediation guidance and support resources so users could move from awareness to action.
Activation and onboarding
Activation flows introduced policyholders to Control, explained the value of the platform, and helped them sign up for the new risk management experience.
This was especially important because Coalition had not previously had a major public-facing product surface like Control.
Navigation and platform integration
The navigation model helped integrate Control into the existing Coalition platform and provided a scalable structure for future customer-facing products.
Rather than mandating adoption top-down, the task force built a small number of example components in partnership with developers first, to demonstrate the system before socializing it to the broader design and developer organization.
Outcomes
Control became a central engagement resource for Coalition policyholders, brokers, and security teams.
The platform helped users understand cyber risk, invite collaborators, access remediation resources, and take action on vulnerabilities. Adoption and engagement metrics showed that users were not only accessing the platform but using it collaboratively as part of broader risk management workflows.
- 100% policyholder activation as of 2021.
- Approximately 53k monthly active users by 2024.
- 56% of users inviting additional users.
- Approximately 93% renewal rate among policyholders engaged with Control, according to internal product reporting.
- Policyholders with one unresolved critical vulnerability were 33% more likely to experience a claim than those who resolved the vulnerability, according to internal product reporting.
These outcomes reflected broader cross-functional work across Coalition's product, design, engineering, security, broker, marketing, and business teams. My contribution centered on helping shape the user experience, research foundation, information architecture, design patterns, and product clarity that supported Control's adoption and usefulness.
Design Organization Contribution
Control was also an important part of Coalition's design organization growth.
Beyond individual product surfaces, I helped establish practices that improved how design work happened across the company:
- Led workshop to collaborate on Experience Design Principles for the Risk Management Platform.
- Helped introduce a shared design system foundation using customizable Material UI patterns.
- Worked with developers to review and QA implementation before release.
- Mentored junior Product Designers.
- Later built Coalition's 0-to-1 user research capability to inform product strategy, design decisions, stakeholder alignment, and service operations.
This work helped Coalition build not only a product experience, but also stronger design and research capability as the company scaled.
Reflection
Coalition Control showed me that trust-centered product design is not only about making complex information easier to read. It is about helping users understand what matters, why it matters, and what action they can take next.
The work required balancing user needs, business strategy, engineering constraints, startup ambiguity, broker relationships, and security expertise. The strongest design decisions came from understanding how policyholders and brokers interpreted risk, where they felt uncertain, and what support they needed to act with confidence.
Feedback
“
We really like seeing the trend of our risk score and graphs of trends in general. Even a quick glance tells if things are going in the right direction.
Summary
Coalition Control turned complex cyber risk intelligence into a clearer product experience for policyholders, brokers, and security teams.
My role was to help make that transformation usable, trustworthy, and scalable — designing key product surfaces, conducting foundational research, shaping navigation and information architecture, supporting product activation, and helping build the design and research practices needed to scale the platform.
