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Enterprise Networking: Getting Started with Cisco

My Role
Design Leadership
Product Direction & Strategy

Story

I built and led a team of amazing Product Designers to reshape Software Defined Networking at Cisco.

Cisco builds amazing networking hardware, but it is not often powered by great software, let alone a great user experience. Being considered predominantly a hardware focused organization, the trend was shifting toward providing enterprise networking management tools in a software package for admins to plan, design, secure, deploy and eventually monitor their network.

This gave rise to Cisco DNA-Center for SD-WAN, and we designed the end to end journey of an Admin's Day 0 and Day N workflows

Concept

We want to make it extremely easy for the Network Admin to get up and running on using their networking management for SD-WAN. Roger can use the Get Started flow to discover devices in his company network, view the topology of these devices and monitor all global events that occur.

Timeline: June 2019 - Oct 2019

My Role

I am a hands on Product Design Leader in the Enterprise Networking Design team leading end to end design process and my involvement has been in the following areas:

  • Design Strategy & Roadmap Definition
  • Design Sprint Facilitation
  • Hands on Product Design for "Get Started"
  • Design Management

Problem

Cisco builds amazing hardware. It is not often powered by great software, let alone a great user experience. In order to realize the full potential of Cisco’s optimal routing capabilities for any network, traditional methods made use of programmatic scripts to configure their devices and relied on third party tools for monitoring and troubleshooting. There was a need for Software Defined Networking and a well thought out product experience for our customers.

Traditional Setup using Command Line Interfaces

Goals

Product Goals

Turn onboarding process from cumbersome to easy, from time consuming to fast, from confusing to clear and more importantly gain user trust from startup onward.

Design Goals & Principles

Guide user in a manner that they feel comfortable and safe during data entry. User will have a clear idea what’s happening in their network and why. User will be free to leave during installation/setup and be contacted when either process is finished with status and next steps.

Research Studies

Survey Results

We sent out a survey to most of our customers in the user panel to understand their current tasks and collaborations in Day 0 Setup and we synthesized the data to uncover that we still don't know the user journey of a single enterprise or mid-market customer.

54%

Responses

95%

of customers wanted Cisco to recommend on how to design their network

84%

preferred to use a single product for their networking needs

12%

felt that they don't need software!!

Cisco Live US 2019

Initial Research Outcomes

"There are just too many manual processes for setup and designing of our WAN network."

- Network Administrator at Wells Fargo

"I expect Cisco to provide network management strategies for my business needs, and a hierarchical structure for policy management."

- Network Administrator at US Department of Transport

"Why do I need to use four different set of tools for my Day 0 network setup?"

- System Administrator at Accenture
Leadership Expectations

"Software Defined Networking will have a $60B market size by 2023. Cisco is at the helm of this opportunity. There is a need of a simplified user experience in the networking industry to realize a Cisco's powerful capabilities such as integrated security, device automation, performance monitoring and artificial intelligence."

- VP of Product, Routing at Cisco

My Design Activities

Journey Map

Customer Workshop

Our Design Thinking team facilitated a workshop for us to uncover a high level understanding on the Day 0 tasks, their collaboration and pain points as they go through setting up their network.

User Flows

Build a Scalable Design System

Our goal was to build a scalable design system that would be the visual language for all of Cisco's Enterprise Networking products, software and hardware inclusive. Traditional user interfaces and command line scripts gave way to a scalable design system that made use of adaptable screen layouts, artifacts for network objects, points of entry and exit for workflows powered by an intent based search.

With a Powerful Architecture

Workflows

These are simple tasks that users would do, our goal was to establish the design system for workflows so we can guide them step by step through the flows are simple to do, easy to comprehend, provide feedback from the system and guide again for next steps.

Design Showcase

Who are you?

Help, when you need it

Grab Intent

Discovering Devices

Completion Satisfaction

User Testing

Contextual Interviews

A total of 14 customers were interviewed as part of getting feedback on our prototype..

Top Takeaways

  • Setting up profiles, discovering devices and securing network before Day N scenarios was a welcoming change to the user's daily workflow.
  • Licensing needed to be a part of this workflow
  • Users were hoping for better design planning recommendations

Next Steps

Proof of Concept

We're currently in development for SD-WAN 2.0, and on track to launch by Spring 2020 for an early field trial, that would go out to 50-75 customers as a beta launch.

Plenty of Fish

Our initial discovery lead to a lot of unexplored use cases captured by our customers and stakeholders.

Planned Design Phases

We are currently in discovery and exploration stages of the Day N use cases, and our goal is to make a seamless journey for our admins for their SD-WAN deployments.