OVERVIEW

Improve time-to-response and operational efficiency

From surfacing unusual activity to knowing that a camera is offline, traditional video security systems often leave users in the dark until it is too late. At Verkada, we’ve built a cloud-based platform that allows teams to proactively see what is happening across their organization, improving time-to-response and operational efficiency. ​

Verkada offers multiple types of notifications to clients. However, there is no centralized place to consume footage and manage all of them. This project aims to create a way to find all of the important notifications in one central place in Command. This feature should improve day-to-day operations by centralizing all of an organization’s meaningful activity into a single, searchable feed.

“How can Verkada make it easier for my team to uncover the events that actually matter in the thousands of hours of video that we’re managing?”

SOLUTION QUICK PEEK

A Complete View of Your Organization

Every day, hundreds—or even thousands—of events happen across an organization that can have hundreds of security cameras. This can range from motion detection to a camera tamper alert. As these events happen, Verkada’s industry-leading edge-based processing delivers instantaneous notifications for teams to take quick and responsible action.​

From the Notifications center, all of these events are available in a single feed, ensuring that users never miss anything important. Everything they need—from capturing a daily summary to building a case—is easily accessible and at their fingertips.

DESIGN PROCESS

Dive deep, then simplify the flow

Based on my user research and user interviews, I dived deep into the current flows to understand the user's needs. I uncovered the pain points and missing parts in the flows.​​

Traditionally, several types of notifications can be set up in Verkada Command. Users had to go to different pages to manage notifications.

In addition, once users receive a notification by either email or SMS, users have the ability to view the footage by clicking the link in the email or SMS. However, after viewing the footage, this notification result can not be found in Command, and the clip does not show separate from the original 24-hour footage. Users often need to start a search by referring to the footage link manually.​

Verkada only offers email and SMS notification methods for all types of notifications to clients. The method of instant notifications in the application is missing. Users often need to open a separate page to view the notification email while using Command.

Separate entry point for each type of notifications

Users feel confused about this approach, it's difficult for them to navigate in the software, and as a result, many of them struggled with the notification set-up flow.

I decided to design a centralized page to manage all of these notifications and display all the notification results. I started talking to some clients and explored an initial set of interface layout based on the information I obtained about their workflow. ​

As this was the first time a notification was being introduced in Command, I collected and analyzed key information to define a notification.

Preliminary explorations for the Notification Feed. I used these early concepts to gather user feedback.

Final Design

DESIGN HIGHLIGHTS

Function Over Form

USE CASE 1

Users receive an instant notification once a suspicious event happened. Without leaving the application or jump between pages, users have a quick and easy way to view the most recent notifications to stay informed.

USE CASE 2

With the ability to create filters for the type of notification as well as the site, users can leverage the Notifications view to provide an overview of continuous activity across cameras. This gives s a simple overview of how events unfolded throughout a site.

IMPACT

Shorten the response loop and improve efficiency

We launched the Notification Center in January 2020. After two months, we discovered this feature shortened incident response time by over 75% based on user feedback and Verkada data. The Notification Center becomes the last part of the Verkada security ecosystem; it completes the loop.​

While incidents often occur suddenly and unpredictably, the brief window of time for identifying and mitigating physical security threats requires immediate detection and rapid response. This traditionally required constant vigilance by a physical security team. With the Notification Center feature, users can improve the operation efficiency by having a proactive solution.