An IT professional working on a laptop in front of a data centre

The platform, from the admin's side.

How IT admins keep a whole company secure on one of Meta's core platforms, and how the product could help them do it better.

At a glance

Client: Meta - research for one of its core enterprise platforms
My role: Service Designer - user research & opportunity mapping
The people: IT admins, each responsible for the security of hundreds of colleagues
Focus: The admin's daily journey, and the human side of keeping a company secure
Deliverable: Pain points and prioritised opportunity areas for the product

The brief

How can the product help an admin keep everyone safe?

Meta wanted its platform to help IT admins do the hard part of their job: keep hundreds of colleagues secure, with the best experience possible. So the brief was to understand the admin's daily reality, and find where the product could help.

A person with a tablet beside server racks in a corridor — The person who configures, secures and runs the platform for everyone behind them.

The people

One admin, responsible for everyone's security.

At an enterprise customer, a single IT admin sets up and secures Meta's platform for hundreds of colleagues, and carries the risk when someone slips. The platform either helps them hold that line, or quietly works against them.

Two people collaborating at a computer — Sitting with admins as they work - not just asking after the fact.

The research

We watched admins work, not just asked them.

We sat with IT admins as they worked through a prototype, asking probing questions along the way. We followed their real journey through the platform, where it helped and where they pushed back.

What stood out

The hardest problems weren't technical. They were human.

The platform handled the technical job. The friction that actually mattered was human: how people behave under pressure, and how one admin gets a whole company to follow good security in practice, not just on paper.

The insightSecuring a company isn't really a systems problem. It's a people problem the system has to support.

A human example

Take passwords. People still write them on Post-its.

An admin can mandate strong passwords all day. People still scribble them on a note stuck to the monitor.

That gap, between the policy and what people actually do, was the real design space. How could the product help the admin make the secure thing the easy, natural thing, so people genuinely go along with it?

Where it landed

Pain points, mapped to opportunities.

A clear picture of where the platform helps admins keep people secure and where it gets in the way, turned into prioritised opportunity areas for Meta to act on.

Meta used the findings to improve the product.

Looking back

What stays with me

Even something as technical as IT security comes down, in the end, to human behaviour: the habits, shortcuts and pressures of real people. Admin workflows and security tooling are a human experience, and they deserve to be designed like one.

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