Persona 01
The security manager
Often the first security hire, technically proficient, and protective of a lean team’s time. Wonders whether the tool fits a team of one.
FIRST-HIRE
PROFICIENT
“not for a team of one”
Vectrix
In a nine-week engagement, we researched, redesigned, and tested a Y Combinator security startup’s platform, lifting task-success to 91% and activation by 76%, before Cloudflare acquired the company.
Cybersecurity (CASB)
·
Web app
·
Seed-stage, Y Combinator
At a glance
Research, redesign, tested.
One nine-week sprint.
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team
5-person
Strategist, designers, account lead
research
8 interviews
Security professionals, PMF
testing
5 participants
Across 8 core flows
handoff
Design system
Plus final prototype
The Client
A Y Combinator startup inventing
à la carte cloud security.
Vectrix · Cibersecurity
Vectrix built an API-driven cloud access security broker, a CASB, that gave IT and security teams one-click visibility and control across all their SaaS applications. It worked like a marketplace of à la carte scanners for tools like AWS, Google Workspace, GitHub, Salesforce, and Dropbox, surfacing issues from unauthorized access and file exposure to misconfigurations and shadow IT.
Our research found the product did not fit any existing category, so part of the job was helping Vectrix define and own a new one. When Wandr came on, Vectrix was an early-stage Y Combinator team with a powerful but deeply technical MVP, and a founding team that knew adoption depended on making that power feel simple.
Y-Combinator
Series A Startup
CASB
A-la-carte cloud security
Acquired
By Cloudfare post Wandr
The Challenge
A powerful platform that asked too much of its users.
Vectrix had built real security capability. The experience around it still assumed the depth of knowledge its own engineers had.
Problem 01
Power buried in complexity.
The platform could do a lot, but it exposed that capability directly. First-time users struggled with setup, deployment, and simply reading whether the system was working.
Problem 02
No defined buyer or category.
There was no clear picture of who the product was for or where it sat in the market, which made both the roadmap and the go-to-market story harder to build.
Problem 03
Trust gaps at the moment of commitment.
The riskiest moments were pricing and permissions. Users were unsure what they were paying for and uneasy about granting access to their data before they had committed.
Problem 04
A wide range of technical fluency.
Buyers ranged from very advanced security engineers to less technical risk analysts, so the same flows had to work for people with very different depth.
Problem 05
Scalability.
MPL needed a system, not a one-off page. Without a shared design language and component library, every new segment, promotion, or market would mean rebuilding from scratch. The experience had to scale as fast as the roadmap.
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Before / After
Same powerful platform,
rebuilt to be adopted.
Drag the handle to see how the core flows changed, from a technical MVP that lost first-time users into a guided, tested experience built around real user mental models.
Before
After WANDR
Our Role
From research to tested prototype.
01
Eight in-depth PMF interviews with security professionals
02
A target-consumer model plus a needs, attitudes, and behaviors map
03
Product positioning and a new-category strategy for à la carte cloud security
04
A high-fidelity redesign of the eight core product flows
05
Moderated usability testing with five security professionals
06
A System Usability Scale survey and per-flow success scoring
07
A PMF scorecard and NPS survey to keep measuring fit
08
A design system and final prototype at handoff
Research
Before redesigning, we defined
The buyer and the category.
Eight in-depth interviews mapped who Vectrix was really for, then five security professionals tested the redesigned prototype flow by flow, scoring each task.
01
interviews
We defined who Vectrix was for.
Eight in-depth interviews with security professionals, clustered into patterns across hiring order, seniority, and technical fluency.
02
testers
Then we tested the redesign.
Five security professionals ran the prototype across eight core flows, each scored for success on a 1 to 3 scale.
03
task success
The redesign tested well.
Task-success on the redesigned flows reached 91%, with six of the eight flows scoring at or near a clean success.
Three buyers, three levels of fluency.
Persona 02
The security engineer
Very advanced and hands-on, moving fast, but tripped up by payment options and unclear permissions.
VERY ADVANCED
HANDS-ON
“I don’t know what I did”
Persona 03
The risk analyst
Less technical, evaluating through cost and outcomes rather than deep configuration. Needs the pricing model to make sense.
LESS TECHNICAL
VALUE-FOCUSED
“why do outputs cost more?”
Teach a new category. Earn trust before commitment.
3 Principles →
Principle 01Trust
01
Teach the category
We framed Vectrix as an à la carte cloud-security marketplace and designed the flows so first-time users could grasp that model instead of guessing at it.
Principle 02Segment
02
Earn trust before commitment
Pricing and permissions were where users hesitated, so we made cost transparent and explained exactly what access each connection granted, before asking anyone to commit.
Principle 03Bingo
03
Design for mixed fluency
Buyers spanned engineers, managers, and analysts, so the redesign used plain language and progressive detail that worked whether or not you lived in security tooling.
Principle 01 of 03→ Continue scrolling
THE KEY INSIGHT
The product wasn’t unclear. The category was.
Vectrix did not fit an existing category, and its buyers ranged from very advanced engineers to less technical analysts.
The redesign’s job was to teach a new model, an à la carte cloud-security marketplace, clearly enough that a first-time user could act on it, without stripping the depth its engineers relied on.
Naming and shaping that category was as much of the work as the screens, and it is the more repeatable version of the problem: a cleaner flow helps once, but a category the market understands compounds.
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Outcomes
What the work moved.
By the end of the engagement, Vectrix had a defined buyer, a redesigned and user-tested product, and a way to measure product-market fit.
Task-success
91%
Task-success rate in usability
testing via the redesigned flows
testing via the redesigned flows
First-run onboarding time
3×
Faster onboarding from 74 minutes
to 24 after the redesign.
to 24 after the redesign.
Lift in user activation
+76%
Reported improvement
post-redesign
post-redesign
By Cloudflare, February 2022
Acquired
Vectrix’s CASB joined
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Performance figures reflect results published on WANDR’s Vectrix case study. The December 2020 usability study additionally recorded per-flow success scores (1.03 to 1.80 on a 1 to 3 scale) and a System Usability Scale of roughly 83.
Client Voice
In their words.
“
WANDR played a critical role in shaping our product at a pivotal time. Their team brought clarity, speed, and senior-level thinking when we needed it most.
Alex Dunbrack
coo · Co-founder, Vectrix
