Not long ago, I attended Rapid7’s placement recruitment event. The event was hugely popular as around 300 people were there.

During the event, I got the chance to talk with some of the UX employees at the company. It was really good practice for me as I’m usually very shy when meeting other people for the first time.

I really enjoyed the company atmosphere and was even more impressed by how they invested a lot in their placement students. Therefore, I decided to apply for their UX design placement role.

After a quick 15 initial interview, I was delighted to hear back from Rapid7. They send me a design challenge in preparation for my next round of interviews. The challenge was to design a desktop security system that utilises IoT devices. We have one week to prototype our idea and present our work in the next interview session.

In the blog, I want to document the design process that I took for the challenge and some of the feedback I received.

Understanding the brief

As this is my first time participating in a design challenge, the most important thing for me was to read the brief carefully and not make silly mistakes.

From reading the brief, I picked up the following main points;

1. The security system should include a Nest Audio, a Ring Video Doorbell Pro, a Nest Learning Thermostat and three other IoT devices of my choosing.
2. Consider how the UI can: quickly alert users to unusual activities using these IoT devices, allow the user to manage these devices, notify the user if the devices are in a state of error and give the user the information they need to return the devices to a non-error state.

Research

The first thing I looked at was how the Nest Audio, Ring Video Doorbell Pro and Nest Learning Thermostat could be used to warn users of unusual activities. From reading these devices’ descriptions online, I found that: