API Security Posture

You know how a traffic light tells you when it's safe to cross? I designed something similar for APIs - one look and you know if everything's okay.

Project Timeline

3 Days

Tools

Figma, Notion & Claude

My Role

Founding Product Designer

Overview

As API security becomes increasingly crucial for organizations, having a clear view of security vulnerabilities is more important than ever. At Akto, we help security engineers discover and test their APIs, ensuring they can identify and fix vulnerabilities before they become problems. But we noticed something that needed fixing in our own product first.

Problem Statement

The data in akto is scattered across multiple pages and it was difficult for security engineers to prioritize what needed their attention the most. They didn’t get the holistic view of the enormous data that Akto had captured for them. This led to Akto not able to showcase it’s power of giving completed discovery and testing for their APIs.

Challenges

  1. Akto captures different kinds of data like API types, security vulnerabilities, APIs by service etc. This made designing a single page to showcase all the data a bit challenging.


  2. Akto's strength of capturing all the data was its biggest weakness too. Bombarding security engineers who had limited mental space to look at all the data made it very difficult for them to take the best course of action.


  3. Homepage would be the first page users will see, so it had to load super fast. Showing data that would take time to load would lead to frustration, so we had to make sure the data shown could be easily fetched without many changes in the backend.

Research & Discovery

Talking to Users 👥

After interviewing security engineers, I discovered that security teams don't operate in silos - they regularly coordinate with developers and management. They needed to present to different stakeholders within the company frequently. This meant our page had to be aesthetically pleasing so they could use screenshots in their internal presentations.

Talking to Founders 👨‍💼👩‍💼

Aligning the homepage with business needs was crucial. I spoke with the founders to understand which segments of Akto were most important from a business perspective.

Talking to Engineers 👨‍🔬

As noted in the challenges, the homepage data needed to be easily queryable and load quickly. I collaborated with the engineering team to ensure the data I planned to display could be fetched efficiently.

The Solution

A no-nonsense view that shows you exactly what's going on with your API security, right when you need it.

P.S. I didn't just stop at design - I worked on the charts UI using Highcharts and Claude, including all the info icon content.