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.
Admins rely on the Sites page for time-sensitive tasks — permission changes, restructuring after an incident, onboarding a new location.
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Visually and structurally outdated.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 since before the Verkada 3.0 design system, so it looked and behaved like a legacy tool bolted onto a modern platform.
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
Org Admins and Site Admins use this page primarily to structure and restructure sites: creating and naming sites and subsites, splitting a site into multiple subsites, moving a subsite elsewhere in the hierarchy, and managing permissions as that structure shifts.
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.
- A 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
I explored three layout approaches, each solving for immediate visibility into site structure.
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 optimized for scanning device counts and permissions quickly. Best for smaller sites or narrower device sets.
Toggle View (Panel & List)
Lets the user switch between the two.
Panel view won because it shows the overall site structure and the ability to view site details, devices, users, bandwidth usage, floorplans,etc. It's scalable, responsive, and supports the restructuring workflow.
Final Design
The final design allows full view of the site lists, as well as the device details, user permission, bandwidth settings, floorplan, and alarm details of the selected site from the panel on the right. Additionally, it supports users in restructuring workflow: renaming, adding subsites, and getting to the devices and user permission easily.
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 can't wait to be over with this
