Re:Designing Cisco
By: Owen Lystrup
Tags: Networking, Design Thinking, Design, Cisco, UX

Design has taken a new position in the business world. In 2015, designer Jon Kolko published an article in the Harvard Business Review proclaiming that “Design Thinking” had come of age. The same year, Dr. Gjoko Muratovski of Tongji University in China, published an academic paper on the “new role of design in business and society,” writing:

“Design has never been more valued as an economic force, nor has it been as culturally influential as it is now. All types of organizations, including once-conservative management consultancies, financial organizations, and banks, have begun to adopt “design thinking” as their guiding principle and are building their internal design competencies.”

The HBR article in particular caught the attention of the enterprise products team at Cisco. The engineers and product developers on the team were working on what would become DNA Center, a network management and command center at the heart of the company’s new Digital Network Architecture that would launch two years later in 2017. Seeing the potential in human-centric design, a few members of the group literally went back to school — Stanford’s d.school in fact, the leading institution for Design Thinking.

It was the beginning of what one of those engineers describes as a major paradigm shift within Cisco.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is essentially a framework for creating clarity and alignment among teams using interactive exercises that engage participants across disciplines. The framework has been around for decades, and large enterprises like IBM, GE, Bloomberg, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, Accenture, Fidelity, Capital One, and others have seen dramatic success implementing it in their business products and processes. It seems to have spread like wildfire within the corporate world in the last five years.

“The word ‘design’ can refer to how something looks — like a concert poster or the shoes on your feet. Design can also describe the way you interact with things — how you drive a car or use the smartphone in your pocket.”

And there are very good reasons for its rise in popularity, especially in technology. The world is becoming much more complex, technically speaking, and Design Thinking was created specifically to find solutions for complex problems.

In networking, complexity is one of the top challenges to successful growth. Network engineers, operators, and architects are grappling with complex multicloud environments, tough security challenges, a flood of IoT devices, and a laundry list of evermore complex business requirements. The larger the organization, the larger the network, the more complex the topology, and the more difficult it is to manage.

While it was specifically created to solve complex problems, Design Thinking is not a silver bullet. And it’s not a guarantee to find the exact solution needed. But when applied correctly using the right stakeholders, “human-centric design” — as it’s also referred to — can produce some powerful and highly creative results.

As Cisco’s published book on Design Thinking begins, “At its core, design is about solving problems.”

Old Technique, New Approach

Designers within Cisco have taken to using design as a guide in making some of the most substantial changes to networking in decades. And the difference is showing.

One of those designers is Michael Kopcsak, senior director of user experience design and research. Kopcsak joined Cisco in 2016 at a pivotal time during the late stages of creating DNA Center, the capstone product of intent-based networking.

At the time, the engineers working on DNA Center had a lodestar goal of making networking simpler. A few clicks should accomplish what would normally take hours through a command line. DNA Center would be the central dashboard with workflows that control a customer’s entire network.

One of the early challenges Kopcsak set out to solve was a lack of cohesiveness between those workflows. To be successful, DNA Center needed a cohesive experience, so as an engineer works with it, she can smoothly transition from one workflow to the next.

“The first step was to develop a cohesive design system, which aligned everything from page width to button typography to color palette,” Kopcsak said in an interview. “That got us on a trajectory of bringing things together cohesively.”

The issue was the initial designs of these workflows were all designed by different groups. So while they were headed in the right direction, they came together in a fragmented state: “They looked different. They felt different. They had different terminology. They had different styles. They had different interaction models. There was basically just no way the tools could come together … There was no common design language,” he said.

Applying a human-centric approach to the design would help create that common design language. From the outset, the team’s early work on UI—buttons, typography, color palettes, page width—was accomplished through traditional product design.

Kopcsak said the team then went on to host Design Thinking exercises both internally and externally with Cisco engineers, TMEs, PMs, SEs and Cisco customers to ensure DNA Center would solve the right customer challenges.

Back to School

Tim Szigeti, a Cisco principal engineer on the DNA Center team, was one of those engineers who attended these sessions. He was also one of the engineers elected to go through Stanford’s d.school program.

As he puts it, this move to a human-centric design is a tidal shift for a company like Cisco. It’s almost hard to overstate what practical differences it will bring in the coming years. “[Going to] Stanford’s d.school was a paradigm shift for us,” Szigeti said. “We as engineers automatically think, ‘Well, we’ve got the best technology; our job is done.’ But [Design Thinking] recognizes that it’s about more than just technology. We have to give equal weight to the user experience. It’s this intersection of technology meeting both business needs and user requirements.”

Applying equal weight behind technology innovation and customer experience was not the typical approach Cisco took in creating its products in the past, according to Szigeti. “Knowing the human user, what they’re pain points are and what their needs are, is not something we gave a lot of thought in the past,” he said. The products coming out of Cisco were made by brilliant engineers simply trying to make the most capable technology possible, which often left the design and interface to those products as an afterthought.

Application Response Time or ART, Szigeti said, is powerful technology that lacked a UI, and confused even the most technical customers. To decipher the metrics that ART generated, customers would have to understand detailed protocol operations, as illustrated in the diagram above. Conversely, DNA Center ingests these metrics from network devices, analyzes them, and presents them in an easy-to-understand format, such as the Application Health Score (shown below).

“Products within Cisco sometimes looked like they came from different companies,” Szigeti said. “Even a predecessor to DNA Center, APIC-EM, had applications within the same platform that looked like they came from a completely different product.”

Cohesiveness is only one desired characteristic that came out of customer advisory sessions. During both Kopcsak’s and Szigeti’s work to identify pain points with customers, it became clear that even basic functions in running a network were potential points of frustration.

Kopcsak realized the very definitions of success had to change. Instead of rapidly developing a product and selling it as a solution for a problem the customer may not even understand, the process had to instead start with establishing empathy and trust.

UI Actually Does Matter

“There’s direct correlation between the fit and finish of a product and there’s the perceived value and the sense of trust in a product,” Kopscak said. “We put a lot of rigor into the UI, because the UI actually does matter. It represents the brand. It represents the hard work of everyone who worked on the product.”

The customer research involved was exhaustive. According to Szigeti, his team conducted more than 60 customer interviews, a majority of which prevented customers from knowing who was asking the questions. “We even talked to our Cisco IT team and went through 12,000 tickets to find out where IT spends time and resources.”

The idea, he said, was to begin designing with the end goal in mind. “We’re not going to do things the way we’ve always done them. We’re going to use this human-centric design initiative and philosophy.”

An example Szigeti used to exemplify the iterative Design Thinking process was his work creating application health scores for DNA Center. Applications experiencing poor performance receive a red badge with a low “health score” number. Behind that single score, what the customer doesn’t see, would be a whole host of performance metrics and indicators feeding it.

An example of the application health score in the DNA Center dashboard. A clean design, with clear indicators of where problems in a customer’s network might lie.

Szigeti said it was imperative to keep the layout clean and have a way for network operators to understand what’s not performing well with a single glance. The end goal was easy to picture, but hard to create.

“So the end goal was showing the customer that there was an application that received a poor health score. How did it receive a poor health score? We’ll work it out later,” he said. “If these particular tools don’t yet exist on our platforms, we’re going to add them to our roadmap, so that we can build the outcome we want from the top down.”

Not Just a Technology Solution

Since Design Thinking is built around empathy for customers, it’s often applied to business processes or even situations where there is no actual product to improve, like a customer support experience or a renewal process.

Jason Cyr, director of user experience for cloud security, has seen Design Thinking applied to a number of non-product scenarios. The potential impact of applying human centric design, he said, is what’s keeping him at Cisco.

“For me, one of the most exciting things that’s kept me at Cisco is this opportunity to influence the company with design thinking,” Cyr said. “I’ve been part of this core team that has been developing the design thinking program at Cisco.”

That core team has its own publication here on Medium. It’s also the group responsible for the publication dedicated to Design Thinking at Cisco quoted earlier.