Design for the Novice…

December 2013

In the article How to Avoid a Common Product Mistake Many Teams Make, Mark Suster (@msuster) observes

The single biggest mistake most product teams make is building technology for what they believe the user would want rather than what the actual end-user needs

At NEXOR, a large part of our business is providing security enforcing technology for very knowledgeable customers – they know the threats they need to mitigate, and thus what the technology needs to perform. As product vendors we cannot second guess this – every situation has it specific nuisances. Thus at NEXOR we have a three core competencies required to ensure we deliver specifically what a customer needs: a solution architecture, professional services and an engineering capability to mould a solution to the exact customer need. We refer to this as modified-off-the-shelf products.
Mark then goes on to present an approach of

Design for the novice, configure for the pro

Which I also endorse. When designing security enforcing products, I offer a spin on the philosophy

Design for the novice, enable the pro to configure

Security is a fine balance of trade-offs, adjusting security parameters can have unforeseen side effects for the unwary. Again, this is why we have implemented a full knowledge transfer element into the delivery of technology under the CyberShield Secure® offer.

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Author Bio – Colin Robbins

Colin Robbins is Nexor’s Managing Security Consultant. He is a Fellow of the IISP, and a NCSC certified Security and Information Risk Adviser (Lead CCP) and Security Auditor (Senior CCP). He has specific technical experience in Secure Information Exchange & Identity Systems and is credited as the co-inventor of LDAP. He also has a strong interest in security governance, being a qualified ISO 27001 auditor.

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