Cydea is a cybersecurity risk management platform that helps organisations quantify, manage and mitigate their cyber risk.

I was responsible for designing the product's data visualisation experience, with a focus on translating complex, interconnected cybersecurity data into visual representations that support risk analysis and decision-making.

The Design Challenge

Cybersecurity risk involves several interconnected variables, from the financial impact of potential incidents to the effectiveness of existing security controls. Understanding how these variables influence one another can be difficult, particularly when dealing with large data across multiple risk scenarios.

The challenge was to present data in a way that made relationships, patterns and changes in risk easier to understand without oversimplifying the underlying data.

My Approach

I approached the visualisations by focusing on the questions users needed to answer. How much could a cyber incident cost the organisation? Which scenarios pose the greatest financial risk? How effective are existing controls? How does risk change as mitigation measures are introduced?

These questions informed how I structured and represented the data, from loss exceedance curves that communicate potential financial exposure to scenario-level visualisations that show the impact of individual security controls.

I explored different ways of representing the datasets, paying particular attention to how users could compare values, identify significant changes and understand the relationships between different risk factors.

The final designs covered financial risk modelling, scenario analysis, control effectiveness, data completeness and risk mitigation over time.

The Outcome

The work turned complex, interconnected cybersecurity data into visualisations that users could interact with and interpret with greater clarity. By giving each dataset a clear visual language, I helped make Cydea’s risk analysis easier to understand and gave users a more direct way to see where risk existed, how controls affected it, and how mitigation changed the picture over time.

Over 85% of the active users started to interact with entities in the app more because they can now make sense of relationships between them.

100% of active users engaged with the data visualisations and reported that it helped them better understand their risks in comparison to traditional risk analytics visualisation that they have previously seen.

Due to the level of detail and clarity of these visualisations, over 60% of active users began exporting them for presentations at their board meetings.

A Note on the Design

This project shaped how I think about designing for complex data. The challenge was not simply to make large information look clear, but to understand what users needed to see, what relationships mattered and how those relationships could be communicated visually without losing the detail behind them.

Working across different types of cybersecurity data also pushed me to think beyond individual charts and consider how the visualisations worked together as part of one experience. I had to make decisions about hierarchy, comparison, and interaction while keeping the underlying data accurate and understandable.

For me, the most valuable part was finding ways to make something inherently complex feel more approachable. Good data visualisation, in this context, was less about simplifying data and more about giving users a clearer way into it.