Cisco ACI
- Roles: Leadership · Product UX Design · Content Design · Customer Research · User Testing
Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is the bedrock of Cisco’s business worldwide and is the key driver of Cisco’s profitability. I was within the newly-formed ACI UX design team, where I led product design and successfuly introduced content design for a range of products related to datacenter networking.
Problem
ACI products had a sub-optimal user experience due to operational reliability being the sole focus.
Solution
- Institute a more customer-centric design approach that focused on users, took their feedback into account, and that utilized research and testing in the product development process.
Team
- Product designers x 5
- Dir. of engineering
- Engineering team
Contact
email@domain.com
000-000-000
— PROJECT NAME
Multi-Site Orchestrator (MSO)
— ROLES
Product design
Content design
User testing
I took over product design for MSO while it was still in its early stages. Like other ACI products, it suffered from a lack of a good user experience. Utilizing our nascent design system, and creating high quality in-product content, made it a prime example of the success our team enjoyed through our collective efforts to bring UX to ACI.
Shown here is a flow within the Multi-Site Orchestrator setup. While this flow may look very normal and nothing to celebrate, it was actually a milestone in design that brought value, with content design that helped the user, and whose simplicity broke with the traditional look and feel of ACI's previous design approach. And it tested well, too. Win-win-win.
— PROJECT NAME
User Persona Creation
— ROLES
Customer research
Collaboration
Working with my department manager, I identified late, middle, and early-career users as our key audiences to guide design. These personas would serve as the basis of all our product design efforts going forward. They would also keep things in perspective when working with highly technical, cross-functional collaborators.
— PROJECT NAME
Content Guide
— ROLES
Research
Content design
Collaboration
I created Cisco ACI’s first content guide to bring a common voice and tone to a highly technical product portfolio.
The aim was to create a guide that designers could use to write in-product content. In addition to this, it would also serve as the basis of a content design practice within the product team in the long run.
— PROJECT NAME
In-product Content
— ROLES
Content design
User testing
Highly technical information needed to be communicated quickly, clearly, and succinctly across our products. Being the sole content person in our team (the by-product of introducing content design to the department), I took on the challenge of creating clear content, with the use of visuals where required to communicate efficiently.
— PROJECT NAME
Product Quickstart Guides
— ROLES
Visual design
Content design
An important piece of user feedback we received was that new users had no way of quickly understanding product basics.
I put together short product guides that contained the basics of what users needed to know such as the location of important features, initial customization of the product, data levels, etc.
Impact
Improvements in product innovation, increased user satisfaction, more effective and efficient UX processes with more focus on the need for customer research, and the introduction of UX writing/content strategy to complete product user experience across the department.