View Edit History

Aware is a monitoring software that provides controls for enterprise-level communication applications, such as Workplace by Facebook or Yammer. It gives any client (say, the HR department of a company) the freedom to create rules and set up alerts based on what that particular company might be interested in keeping an eye out for, all without needing to pay somebody to scroll through thousands of messages on a daily basis. Whether it’s detecting an unreported sexual harassment case in a private channel or redacting credit card information when it isn’t supposed to be shared, it serves as a customizable watchdog. This helps keep employees safe and sensitive information secure, all while reducing the legal liability of using such powerful communication tools.

The first image below is what it would look like if a client received a notification that one of their employees was sexually harassing a coworker, triggering an event based on keywords. The Event Context panel on the right gives the user a window into the conversation surrounding the event, helping them determine whether or not the trigger is a false alarm or something to be concerned about.

In this specific example, we ran into an issue with how intuitively this page would display if, say, somebody sexually harassed a coworker and then attempted to edit their message to cover it up. In the original prototype, the most recent version of an edited message would show up highlighted in the Event Context panel as if it was the offending message, even if it was now seemingly innocuous. This could potentially lead to an inaccurate amount of events being flagged as false alarms. We were wrongly assuming that the user would think to check the View Edit History button for any possible inflammatory messages.

I proposed that we always display the offending message in the Event Context panel, even it if had been edited. This would take the users directly to what they are looking for, all while reducing the chances of mistakenly marking something as a false positive. If a user wants to see the edit history, including appropriate editions of the message, they could click into the View Edit History modal and see a chronological list of all edits made. This is displayed in the modal in the second image.

My idea became quickly controversial; While it made perfect sense from a usability perspective, the engineering and data science teams worried that it could compromise the security and integrity of the most current version of the event context. After discussing the benefits and risks with coworkers from all of the teams in the office, my proposition was embraced as the most user-centric, and this feature is still included in the software’s most current version.