Cisco
Multi-Site
Orchestrator
I was within the newly-formed Cisco ACI UX design team, where I led product design for various highly complex datacenter networking products.
In addition to this, I also successfully championed content design and user research and added them to the product design process.
My Roles
· Product UX design
· Content design
· Customer research
· User testing
Team
- · Product Designer
- · Engineering Manager
- · Engineers
- · Product Manager
Years
- 2018 – 2019
Contact
email@domain.com
000-000-000
Problem
Network administrators managing multiple ACI sites lacked a clear, unified way to see site health and configure connections across data centers, leading to slow troubleshooting, duplicated effort, and high cognitive load in existing tools.
Solution
A workspace where network administrators could see real-time status for all global sites at a glance, quickly set up and manage inter-site connectivity with fewer steps and less context switching, and trust that policies were applied consistently across sites and clouds without digging into low-level configuration across multiple systems.
Team
- Product designers x 5
- Dir. of engineering
- Engineering team
Contact
email@domain.com
000-000-000
MSO: From Chaos To Clarity
Since MSO was still relatively new, it became the perfect canvas for our evolving design system. Instead of retrofitting patterns onto a legacy interface, we could apply consistent components from day one and watch how they performed in a real, high‑stakes environment. Every release gave us signal: which patterns reduced cognitive load, which interactions failed under real-world complexity, and where content needed to do more of the heavy lifting.
Framing The UX Bet
Early conversations with users revealed a recurring theme: they were less interested in “configuring features” and more interested in knowing, in seconds, whether their global network was healthy and connected. They needed:
• A fast, trustworthy at‑a‑glance view of site health and connectivity across regions.
• Simple, repeatable flows to connect and manage distant sites without wading through low‑level details.
The design bet was simple: if MSO could tell a clear story about the state of the network and make cross‑site changes feel low‑risk, customers would actually feel confident using it.
Bringing The Experience To Life
I leaned heavily on the design system to standardize layouts, typography, and interaction patterns, then focused on the narrative of the UI: what story the dashboard told in the first 5 seconds, how error states guided recovery, and how in‑product content could quietly coach users through complex tasks. The global dashboard evolved into a calm, information‑rich surface that highlighted site status, critical issues, and connectivity at a glance, while detailed views were just one click away for deep troubleshooting. Flows that once felt like configuring a distributed system now felt more like connecting dots on a map.
Outcomes And User Response
To validate the direction, I ran moderated sessions with seven real‑world users who managed multi‑site ACI deployments.
Participants consistently described the new experience as “clear,” “predictable,” and “easy to reason about,” especially when setting up or modifying multi‑site connections.
They reported high satisfaction with the amount of information in the flow, the ease of setting up sites, and the clarity of the dashboard’s status story, confirming that the UX design approach was working as intended.
Impact
MSO became a reference point for how ACI products should look and feel, reducing cognitive load for network admins, speeding up multi-site operations, and informing the next generation of patterns in our design system.