Antisyphon Training
Initially, I was hired at Black Hills Information Security/Antisyphon Training as a software engineer. However, that role quickly evolved into conceptualizing our new website.
I partnered with creative directors and design teams, as well as key stakeholders to create an intuitive experience for cybersecurity professionals.
E-Commerce Evolution
Rather than creating just another static site that linked to third-party platforms, I envisioned an intuitive marketplace where users could seamlessly purchase any type of course through a shopping cart experience.
This would allow us to offer a wide range of courses, from live events to on-demand training, all in one place. I also envisioned a system that would allow us to easily add new courses and manage existing ones.
UX Design
Using Figma, I designed over 50 wireframes, refining them through multiple rounds of discussion, feedback, and iterations. Since Black Hills Information Security was developing comics, I wanted the site to be both fun and user-friendly, with course badges that resembled in-game achievements.
Once the wireframes were finalized, we hired Fried Design to craft a unique visual identity for the site, including achievement-style course badges.
Intuitive Dashboards
Starting with boilerplate WooCommerce and heavily customizing it, we built a seamless logged-in experience for user account management.
This includes sections for Live and On-Demand courses, powered by API queries to track progress, generate certificates, and manage subscriptions. Since our third-party LMS identifies users by email address, we customized account management features to allow updates while clearly warning users of potential consequences.
Admin Experiences
In addition to the consumer-facing site, Antisyphon Training also serves as a full-featured WordPress CMS, which required its own UX considerations. While design played a smaller role here, our focus was on making content administration fast, intuitive, and reliable.
Using powerful plugins like The Events Calendar, Events Tickets Plus, and Advanced Custom Fields, we customized the admin experience, reducing course and content creation time by approximately 85%. This was all synced with a PHP/MySQL backend to ensure seamless integration with the LMS and generate reports.
Surfacing API messages, generating unique IDs, and allowing admins to edit orders were just a few of the key features, much of which we built from scratch.
Site designed and built by Michael Zick using React, Next.js, and Redux Toolkit.