[current company]'s product was desktop-only, but the people using it — SOC analysts and incident responders — don't stop being on-call when they close their laptop. When a high-severity alert fired outside business hours, there was no way to triage or respond without getting to a workstation, and by the time someone did, they were walking in cold.
[ Describe how this problem surfaced — a customer request, a churn signal, a support pattern — and why leadership greenlit exploring a mobile product. ] I was asked to validate whether a mobile companion app made sense for our security-conscious enterprise customers, and if so, take it from concept to a shipped v1 as the sole designer on the project.
[ Describe the research: how many analysts/incident responders you talked to, across how many accounts, and what methods you used (interviews, shadowing on-call shifts, diary studies). ] The clearest theme: people were already improvising mobile workflows with email forwards and Slack pings, which meant missed alerts, duplicated effort, and no reliable way to actually act on anything from a phone.
Not every desktop workflow translates to a phone, and trying to cram the full product into a small screen would have solved nothing. [ Describe how you scoped the minimum viable action set for mobile — e.g. acknowledge, triage severity, escalate, add a note — versus what stays desktop-only. ]
The desktop product was built for depth — dense tables, layered detail views, time to dig in. Mobile forced the opposite: a security professional glancing at a lock screen needs to know, in seconds, whether something requires action right now. [ Describe the visual/information hierarchy decisions you made to support that — severity color coding, progressive disclosure, card layouts. ]
For a lot of the target workflow, the app itself almost disappears — the real interaction happens at the notification. [ Describe how you designed actionable push notifications (acknowledge/escalate directly from the lock screen), deep linking into the right alert, and how you handled offline or delayed-delivery states. ]
Static mockups don't tell you whether a swipe-to-triage gesture actually feels fast under pressure. [ Describe the coded/interactive prototypes you built to test real interaction timing and gestures with analysts before committing engineering resources to the native build. ]
The existing design system was built around dense desktop tables — it had no answer for touch targets, thumb reach, or platform-native motion. [ Describe how you built out a parallel mobile pattern library (in Figma / code), and how you kept it consistent with the existing brand and design language while adapting it for iOS and Android conventions. ]
As the sole designer on a 0-to-1 mobile product, I worked in close, continuous loop with engineering rather than handing off a finished spec. [ Describe your working relationship with the mobile engineers, how design decisions got validated against real builds quickly, and any tooling (e.g. coded prototypes, shared component naming) that kept design and engineering in sync. ]
[ What would you do differently on a 0-to-1 mobile product? How did designing for a brand-new platform change your process compared to iterating on an existing desktop product? What surprised you about how security professionals actually used their phones on the job? ]