Sarana Davaa
Project Background
Verkada provides enterprise physical security solutions — video surveillance, door access control, air quality monitoring, alarms, intercoms, and visitor management — all managed from one platform.
The Sites page is where admins organize devices and manage permissions across every location their organization runs. It’s foundational to the platform experience: almost every other workflow eventually routes through it. But the existing interface was a dense, spreadsheet-style grid that hadn’t been rethought as the product line grew — and it was effectively unusable on mobile.
My goal was to redesign it into something scalable, mobile-capable, and aligned with the newer Verkada 3.0 design language — without breaking the complex permission and hierarchy logic power users depended on.
Why It Needed to Change
Not usable on mobile.
Users expect high-quality SaaS products to support core functions on mobile, and there was a company-wide push to make the entire Verkada web platform usable on mobile devices.
Not scalable.
Every new product line added a new column to the grid. This worked when Verkada had a handful of device types; it broke down as the ecosystem grew, and some products weren’t represented in the view at all — so admins couldn’t get a unified picture of a site.
Visually and structurally outdated.
The page hadn't been touched in a while, so it wasn't aligned with the recently rolled out Verkada 3.0.
Research
I ran a UX audit, then structured the investigation around a few research questions before doing any exploration:
To answer these, I combined a UX audit, stakeholder and design-history interviews, sessions with Solutions Engineers (who see how large enterprise customers actually configure their sites), and direct customer interviews.
What I learned
One of the intentional constraints of the Verkada platform is that user permissions are granted per site, not per device. As organizations get more familiar with the platform over time, they often revise their naming conventions and site hierarchy — and this restructuring surfaced real friction, especially for large enterprises managing hundreds of locations and devices. The friction was concentrated in three places:
- Cumbersome restructuring — users had to strip out every device and subsite before they could delete or move a site.
- Disjointed workflow — restructuring meant bouncing between separate pages to move devices and separately manage permissions.
- No bulk actions — every change was one at a time, even for customers managing hundreds of sites.
Some of the data points that shaped prioritization:
- One Solutions Engineer was writing a custom script for an enterprise customer with 700+ sites to help them change the site structure.
- A Solutions Engineering Manager noted that one of Verkada’s largest customers restructures roughly 10 subsites into different parents every year.
- A customer requested drag-and-drop restructuring at a Verkada customer conference.Customers needed to change site hierarchy without deleting and recreating sites, since that meant re-adding every device and resetting every configuration from scratch.
- Customers highlighted the importance of naming convensions and they had to iterate multiple times.
Beyond the core friction, a few opportunities stood out: the Sites page had potential as a homepage (Verkada currently defaults to the Camera page), floorplan integration was a natural extension since floorplans are site-based, and customers wanted the ability to pin key sites and export site data for compliance reporting.
Design Exploration & Rationale
Panel View
A persistent side panel showing hierarchy alongside detail. Best for admins who work across many sites at once and need to keep context while drilling into one.
Expanded List View
A flat, scrollable list that expands to disclose details when a user clicks into an item. A matter of preference more than a fit for a particular use case.
Toggle View (Panel & List)
Lets the user switch between the two. Ultimately dropped, since it expanded the scope of the project without much added benefit.
Final Design
The final design gives a full view of the site list alongside a right-hand panel showing device details, user permissions, bandwidth settings, floorplans, and alarm details for the selected site. It also supports the full restructuring workflow — renaming sites, adding subsites, and reaching devices and permissions without leaving the view.
Navigating Constraints
- Drag-and-drop was rejected for technical reasons.
- Bulk actions weren’t supported in this phase.
- Bandwidth settings were added mid-project as a new requirement.
Outcome
- ✓ Fully responsive on mobile
- ✓Scalable to Verkada’s full, growing device catalog
- ✓ Aligned with the Verkada 3.0 design system
- ✓ Simplified permission viewing and editing
- ✓ Faster, lower-friction site restructuring
- ✓ High-level view of the entire site with everything related to the site
Reflection
I came into this project from a UX research background, and it's where my drive to simplify complexity started. I was excited to work on it going in — the existing page had so much room to improve, and that potential is what drew me to it. Partway through, though, I didn't always have the trust or autonomy from the team to move as freely as I needed to, and I was moved off the project before I could fully close it out.
Looking back, I'd have designed my stakeholder feedback sessions differently. Stakeholders aren't automatically your creative collaboration team; sometimes the better move is to take full ownership and make the decision simple for people to weigh in on, rather than opening everything up for debate.
The research surfaced more complexity than I expected, especially for customers managing multiple locations with hundreds of devices. The team genuinely didn't have enough backend engineering resources to work through everything I surfaced — a real structural constraint, separate from the trust issues above. Through all of it, I kept taking small steps forward instead of waiting for full clarity or approval — that is what I value most from working on this project.