The Analog Incident Train Station Wardrobe: Designing Paper Costumes for Every On‑Call Persona

Security incidents don’t wait for anyone to get comfortable. When the alert fires at 2:13 a.m., no one cares how elegant your architecture diagram is. What matters is how quickly the right people can understand what’s happening, decide what to do, and execute—without tripping over tools, processes, or each other.

In the push for rapid incident response, we obsess over detection fidelity, automation, and forensics capabilities. Those are essential. But we often underinvest in the human experience of being on call—the interfaces, workflows, and expectations that shape how different people actually respond under pressure.

This is where an unusual idea can help: the analog incident train station wardrobe.

Imagine a wall full of paper costumes at a train station: each outfit labeled for a different on‑call “persona,” ready to be grabbed when the alarm bell rings. Not literal clothes, of course, but paper prototypes of tailored interfaces, dashboards, checklists, and tools—each designed for the real jobs, behaviors, and stress patterns of specific responders.

In this post, we’ll explore how to:

Connect incident response speed to better interface and workflow design.
Use jobs‑to‑be‑done personas instead of generic role descriptions.
Build an analog wardrobe of paper costumes to test and refine these experiences.
Combine structured playbooks with rich personas to design scalable, human-centered incident tooling.

Why Speed Is the North Star in Incident Design

Every second in an incident has an opportunity cost:

An attacker has more time to move laterally.
Data exfiltration continues.
Customers experience more downtime.

Modern forensics and incident response tools recognize this. Their value is measured less by theoretical feature lists and more by how quickly they help teams:

Collect relevant digital evidence.
Analyze and interpret that evidence.
Act decisively to contain and remediate.

That means ease of use is not a luxury; it’s a performance variable. Cognitive friction—too many tabs, unclear labels, hidden actions—literally increases impact.

At scale, this matters even more. Enterprise security teams are:

Large and often distributed across time zones.
Mixed in experience: juniors, seniors, contractors, and partners.
Rotating through on‑call schedules with different responsibilities.

If your incident workflows assume the skills, context, and mental model of a single “ideal” responder, you’re leaving speed on the table. You need experiences that scale across people as well as across incidents.

The Trap of Role-Based Thinking

Most incident response design still starts with roles:

“Tier 1 analyst”
“Incident commander”
“Forensics engineer”
“SRE on call”

Then we vaguely assume what they need:

“Tier 1 needs a triage dashboard.”
“IR lead needs a timeline.”
“Forensics needs evidence.”

But roles and titles are proxies. They don’t tell you:

How someone actually behaves under pressure.
What they’re afraid of getting wrong.
What they prioritize instinctively when the alarms go off.

Titles also obscure the fact that the same person may wear multiple hats:

The SRE who occasionally acts as incident commander.
The security engineer who switches between threat hunting and emergency forensics.

Designing for “roles” risks giving everyone the same generic, overloaded interface, just with different labels. That’s when you see:

Dashboards crammed with information “for everyone.”
Playbooks written like policy documents instead of decision aids.
Tools that assume infinite attention and heroic memory.

To design faster response, we need a better starting point: jobs‑to‑be‑done personas.

Jobs-To-Be-Done Personas: Beyond Titles

A jobs‑to‑be‑done (JTBD) persona isn’t “Tier 2 Analyst, based in London.” It’s a description of the work they are trying to accomplish in a specific situation, plus how they think and feel about it.

For incident response, a strong persona includes:

Core job-to-be-done
What they are hired (or called in) to achieve in a given phase of the incident.
- Example: “Confirm whether an alert is real, prioritize it against others, and route it to the right team in under 10 minutes.”
Context and constraints
Things like time of day, communication tools, access to systems, and organizational rules.
- Example: “Remote, on a tablet, limited VPN bandwidth, multiple chat channels.”
Behavioral traits and attitudes
How they think, react, and prioritize.
- Are they risk-averse or bold?
- Do they prefer step-by-step instructions or flexible guidelines?
- Do they tend to over-communicate or under-communicate during stress?
Pain points and fears
What slows them down or keeps them anxious.
- “I’m scared of declaring an incident too early and waking up executives.”
- “I don’t want to accidentally destroy evidence while trying to contain.”
Signals of success
How they know they’ve done their job well.
- “I escalated the right things and didn’t become the blocker.”
- “My handoff notes were clear enough that no one pinged me after shift.”

Personas built this way are grounded in real user problems and needs, not in HR org charts. They give you the vocabulary to ask: What should it feel like to be this person during an incident? What would make them faster and calmer?

The Train Station Wardrobe Metaphor

Now, picture a bustling train station. Each departing train is a different incident type—ransomware, insider threat, production outage, fraud investigation. Each needs a slightly different crew with different capabilities.

Outside the platforms is a wardrobe of costumes on hangers:

The First Responder Coat: quick pockets for alerts, a big badge saying “Triage.”
The Incident Commander Jacket: epaulettes for authority, built-in checklists.
The Forensics Cloak: many hidden compartments, evidence labels, chain-of-custody loops.
The Comms Conductor Hat: bright color, a schedule of stakeholder updates tucked into the brim.

In our analog exercise, each “costume” is a paper prototype of a tailored experience for a JTBD persona:

A different default dashboard layout.
Different notifications and thresholds.
Different checklists, forms, or shortcuts.
Different language and level of detail.

When an incident “train” arrives, the right people grab their costumes—their preferred views, tools, and responsibilities snap into place.

The metaphor is playful, but the goal is serious:

Make it as easy and natural as possible for each persona to do their best work, fast, without sifting through irrelevant noise or guessing what’s expected.

Building the Analog Wardrobe: A Practical Exercise

You can run this as a workshop with your security, SRE, and incident management teams. All you need is paper, markers, and a willingness to act things out.

1. Define a Few High-Impact Personas

Start with 3–5 personas tied to critical jobs-to-be-done. For example:

The Alert First Responder: Triage alerts, confirm or dismiss, route correctly.
The Incident Commander: Owns decisions, priorities, and communication cadence.
The Forensics Investigator: Preserves and analyzes evidence to answer: what, how, and how far.
The Business Liaison: Translates technical status into risk and impact for leaders.

For each, write out:

Job-to-be-done (in one sentence).
Typical scenario (ransomware, data exfil, unknown malware, etc.).
Behaviors under stress.
Top 3 fears.
Top 3 success signals.

2. Sketch Their “Costume” on Paper

On large sheets of paper, draw an outline of that persona’s ideal incident interface as if it were clothing:

Pockets = pinned views or data sources.
Buttons = key actions (contain host, page team, preserve evidence).
Badges = status indicators or role-specific info.
Lining = background context they always wish they had.

Ask:

What must be immediately visible the moment they “put it on”?
Which actions should be one click away, not buried?
What can be safely hidden to reduce noise?

Don’t worry about perfect UI design. This is about priorities and information architecture.

3. Anchor Costumes to Playbooks

Pull out your incident response playbooks—ideally standardized, centralized, and version-controlled.

For each persona, mark on the paper costume:

Which playbook steps they own.
Where they hand off to another persona.
Which steps they find confusing or redundant.

You’ll quickly see gaps:

Steps that assume knowledge they don’t have.
Missing prompts (e.g., “Preserve logs before blocking IPs”).
Unclear responsibilities during handoffs.

This is where structured playbooks and rich personas reinforce each other:

Playbooks provide consistency and speed across scenarios.
Personas ensure those playbooks are actually usable by real people.

4. Run a Simulated Incident in Costumes

Now, act out an incident:

Assign participants to personas.
Give them their paper costumes and corresponding “views.”
Walk through a scenario step by step.

Observe:

Who is overloaded with information or decisions?
Who is under‑informed and keeps asking for context?
Where are the bottlenecks and awkward handoffs?

Capture these as design requirements for your real tooling:

“Incident commander view must surface business impact and recommended comms cadence.”
“First responder dashboard should highlight deduplicated alerts across sources.”
“Forensics tools should embed chain-of-custody guidance inline, not in a separate wiki.”

Scaling the Wardrobe for Real Teams

The analog wardrobe is a low‑tech prototype of a high‑stakes reality. To scale it for real use:

Codify persona-specific views and workflows in your tools.
Where possible, allow people to choose “modes” or roles that reconfigure the interface.
Integrate playbooks directly into tooling.
Don’t rely on static PDFs. Embed key steps, checklists, and guardrails where the work happens.
Standardize—but don’t flatten—personas.
Global teams need consistency, but they also need role-appropriate variation. You can have a global incident commander pattern with regional nuances.
Continuously refine based on real incidents.
After each major incident, ask not only “What failed technically?” but also “Which costume tore at the seams?” Update personas, playbooks, and interfaces accordingly.

The payoff is cumulative: each iteration makes the next incident faster, clearer, and less chaotic.

Conclusion: Dress for the Incident You Have

We like to think of incident response as purely technical: log sources, detection rules, forensics suites. But incidents are fundamentally human systems under stress. Speed comes from:

Clear expectations.
Role-appropriate information.
Frictionless tools and handoffs.

By grounding your design in jobs-to-be-done personas, capturing their behaviors and attitudes, and experimenting with an analog train station wardrobe of paper costumes, you can:

Turn static playbooks into living, persona-aware workflows.
Tailor interfaces and tools to how people actually think and act.
Shorten investigation and response times without demanding heroics.

The next time you review your incident tooling, don’t just ask, “What can this platform do?” Ask instead:

If this were a costume hanging in our train station wardrobe, which persona would rush to put it on—and would it help them catch the right train, in time?

Design for that moment, and you won’t just be adding features. You’ll be engineering faster, calmer, and more humane incident response at scale.