One of the UX challenges our team has been working on at Moonlock is pretty simple to describe, but much harder to solve:
How do you make security software useful to someone who doesn’t understand and honestly shouldn’t need to understand – cybersecurity terminology?
A lot of traditional security experiences depend heavily on technical alerts, threat names, permissions, severity levels, and warnings. But for the average user, more information doesn’t necessarily mean more clarity.
With Moonlock, we tried to approach this differently.
That meant things like using plain language instead of jargon, explaining why a permission is needed before asking for it, making the next action obvious when something is detected, and using calmer visual communication instead of making every security event feel like an emergency.
We also spent a lot of time thinking about what not to show. There’s always a tension between giving people enough context to make an informed decision and overwhelming them with details that are meaningful mostly to security professionals.
That work was recently recognized with a 2026 Red Dot Award in Interface & User Experience Design, which was a nice milestone for the team – but it also made us curious how other UX people approach this problem.
When you’re designing for a highly technical domain, how do you decide what complexity the user actually needs to see – and what should stay behind the scenes?
Source: r/userexperience · by /u/moonlock_security