Cisco
S
2018
Enterprise
Ux
Design
Internship
Restructured the information architecture for a complex enterprise management system
B2b system
I advocated for usability in a developer dominant team and leveraged my computer science knowledge by explaining design logic in developer terms.
Overview
Confusing Existing logic
Lack of Documentation
Disparaging Interpretations
Untangle nested logic
Project: Access Verification Report
The previous verification page was very confusing to not only the users but also our developers. My goal was to find a way to make the page more intuitive by cleaning up the content while pruning rarely used functionalities.
Understanding
I met with PMs, backend developers and looked at the SQL logic and existing database to understand the function and intention of the verification report.
There are 2 main entities: people and resources.
Overall
System structure
Access Verification Report = A record of processed Verification Requests
Normal State
A person can have some sort of an access right to a resource
Access
Verification report
Problems Tackled
Not questioning
spec sheet
I originally delved straight into trying to implement the functionalities stated on the spec sheet I got. These functionalities were extremely complex, and different in subtle ways. Many of the backend engineers did not know how they worked exactly. I did come up with temporary solutions for this problem before I realized later that these functionalities were not needed altogether.
Original user group
too general
With no clue of who our target audience is, we first tested with the expert users. Although the design iteration tested poorly with them, we learned that we only need to tailor the page to auditors. We should have found the target audience(auditors) before delving into the spec sheet
After interviewing auditors
Auditors would never use the spec sheet's features
Auditors would almost never filter the records by a specific user’s or approver’s ID. They care more about specific resources.
Timeline
Constraint
The spec sheet functionalities must be included this production sprint, although they were found to be not needed. So I hid them under "more filters" to still include them but so that our users will not have to interact with them.
Adapted temporary design to fit production time crunch for client
Production & Testing
Giving fully-fledged prototypes and testing interface myself is always more reliable than static designs with instructions and relying on QA members to test. I was surprised to catch so many small but significant usability issues even after working closely with developers all throughout.
Quick testing & iterations with developers
Other Projects Preview
Resource
Detail & Report
Cloning
Resources
Onboarding
Process
Learnings
Identifying the correct targeted user audience is so important! I learned to never take information collected from a previous step for granted and to be flexible towards making changes.
Advocate for ux
It is easy for developers to interpret functions the way they had it implemented. If I empathize with my developer’s viewpoint, articulate my thoughts using developer’s terms, draw out ERD diagrams or write out my intentions in pseudo code, newly designed logic can be very quickly understood.