Case Study: Inform
Reimagining the Modern SOC

Multi-Monitor Experience

Inform automates Security Operations Centers. It uses AI to monitor & triage all threats simultaneously in real time, and automate your responses, saving operator time, responding faster, and reducing false alarms.

The Challenge

At Motorola Solutions, we recognized a growing challenge within Security Operations Centers (SOCs): as physical and digital threats became more complex, operators were overwhelmed… drowning in fragmented alerts, toggling across systems, and facing growing cognitive fatigue. The constant context switching, high training burden, and lack of streamlined workflows led to human error, missed incidents, and operator burnout.

Meanwhile, SOC managers grappled with high turnover, compliance pressures, and insufficient visibility into performance and accountability. While Motorola offered powerful products, such as Avigilon Unity for video surveillance, DMS for alert aggregation, and Facility/SOC tools for managing digital threats, there was no unified solution that connected these platforms into a cohesive, end-to-end security workflow.

This case study reflects our strategic effort to bridge that gap: to envision and design an integrated SOC experience that reduces noise, improves situational awareness, and unites Motorola’s product ecosystem into a single, operator-first platform.

My Role

As Director of UX, I led the end-to-end design strategy for our next-generation SOC platform—Inform—bringing together previously siloed products (Avigilon Unity, DMS, Facility) into a unified experience tailored for real-world operators. I managed a global team of UX and visual designers, researchers, and prototypers across Chicago, Vancouver, Lisbon, and Bangkok.

I worked as a strategic partner to product and engineering leadership (including CVP Product, CTO org, and AI teams), aligning user research with roadmap planning and pushing for foundational design investments in operator workflows, multi-modal interfaces, and alert triaging. I also collaborated closely with sales and customer success to ensure our vision addressed both competitive gaps and client-specific needs across enterprise verticals like education, retail, and corporate security.

Primary Personas

Integrators / Installers
“The ones who set it all up — but don’t stick around after deployment.”
Role: Third-party or internal technicians responsible for installing and configuring security systems across video, access control, alerting, and SOC interfaces.

Security Operators
“The front lines. Monitoring cameras, triaging alerts, chasing incidents—every second counts.”
Role: Operate security systems in real-time, monitoring for suspicious activity, verifying alerts, escalating threats, and dispatching responses.

Security Operator Managers
“The supervisors making sure the operators—and the system—don’t fail.”
Role: Manage the SOC day-to-day, ensuring incidents are handled properly and teams are operating efficiently.

IT Admins / Developers
“The glue that makes the systems talk to each other—if the tools let them.”
Role: Internal IT staff or partner developers responsible for setting up network access, system integrations, user roles, and long-term infrastructure health.

Chief Security Officers (CSOs)
“The executive lens—focused on risk, compliance, and strategic readiness.”
Role: Executive responsible for overall security strategy, regulatory compliance, and protecting people/assets across physical and digital domains.

Approach

We began with immersive foundational research, visiting real SOCs across North America—including Georgia Tech Police, Coca-Cola, and Cox Communications—to map current workflows, tools, and mental models of the Operator, Manager, and Admin personas.

Outcomes

The Inform SOC platform prototype brought clarity and cohesion to what had previously been a fragmented operator experience. Our AI-powered alert summaries, FOA map integration, and Smart Tour workflows were met with strong validation from both internal and external stakeholders:

• 40% reduction in time to verify incidents (measured in internal SOC pilot vs legacy flow)

• 2x increase in situational clarity among operators during scenario testing (based on qualitative usability sessions)

• Decreased false alarm fatigue by integrating Smart Filtering logic and scene-aware camera summaries

• Accelerated product alignment across Avigilon Unity, Facility, and DMS teams, establishing a unified roadmap and shared design system

• Influenced roadmap priorities and sales demos for enterprise clients in education, retail, and logistics verticals

The platform also helped shift Motorola’s internal conversation from feature gaps to workflow unification—bringing product and engineering stakeholders into shared ownership of the operator experience.

Reflection

Leading this effort reinforced my belief that alignment is design's most powerful multiplier. Getting product, engineering, and go-to-market teams to co-own the operator journey unlocked better decisions and greater velocity.

I also learned the value of designing for resilience and clarity in high-stress environments. Security operators don’t need more data—they need better defaults, clear prioritization, and role-aware tools that guide rather than overwhelm. Much of my role was not just in designing interfaces, but in creating shared understanding around what problems we were truly solving and for whom.

If I were to do this again, I would push even earlier for cross-functional prototyping with real client data—and extend our validation cycles deeper into post-incident review workflows to close the loop on SOC accountability.

From there, I facilitated North Star visioning workshops across product, design, and engineering, creating shared mental models and identifying friction points across Motorola’s fragmented ecosystem. We used journey maps and service blueprints to highlight context-switching pain, lack of accountability visibility, and alert fatigue.

I championed a modular design system and AI-first framework for our integrated SOC platform, introducing:

• Smart Tours: AI-curated camera sequences for proactive monitoring

• Contextual Alert Summaries: Natural language descriptions, tied to FOA maps and historical device activity

• Multi-modal Dashboards: Role-based layouts for operators, supervisors, and incident investigators

• Cross-Product Interop: Unified workflows connecting Avigilon Unity (video), Facility (alerts), and access control

Throughout the process, we prototyped rapidly in Figma and iterated based on field feedback, integrating input from early pilot customers and Motorola’s internal security teams.