Enhancing Decision Making with a Holistic System View

How did we create a dashboard to provide users with an overview of their Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator's environment?

Company

Company

Cisco

Role

Role

  • Interaction Design

  • UX Research

  • Visual Design

Collaboration

Collaboration

  • Product Manager

  • Marketing Team

  • Developers

  • QA Team

Duration

Duration

6-8 weeks

Challenge

Users currently lack a comprehensive overview of their network environment. They struggle to understand the overall health, status, and interdependencies of their deployed templates, sites, and other objects. This limited visibility hinders effective troubleshooting, optimization, and proactive management of network operations.

Goal

User Goal: Users aim to gain a comprehensive understanding of their network environment to efficiently troubleshoot, optimize, and manage network operations.

Business Goal: To enhance user satisfaction and drive product adoption by providing a clear and actionable overview of the network environment within the Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.

By fulfilling these goals, we can improve operational efficiency and reduce support costs.

Solution

To address the lack of comprehensive network visibility, we developed a dashboard providing a clear overview of the NDO instance. This centralized view offers real-time insights into template deployment status, associated sites, and potential issues.

This enhanced understanding of network operations and configurations enables users to make more informed decisions and optimize network performance.

Key Findings

58%

Limited System Visibility

Of users struggled to quickly assess key network metrics and overall system health, hindering efficient decision-making.

60%

Delayed Issue Detection

Of users struggled to efficiently identify network components requiring attention, leading to delayed issue resolution and potential service disruptions.

Brainstorming

After many brainstorming sessions (and some serious noodle-scratching), our goal was to pick out the key stats to show. We made a huge list, then sorted them into four groups, and the whole team pitched in to make them super clear and snazzy!

Brainstorming session with the Product Manager (Carlos), Design Manager (Dan) and the design team

Designs

We took those sorted stats and started doodling out rough sketches (like drawing on a napkin at lunchtime). This back-and-forth helped us iron out any wrinkles and fine-tune our designs.

Map View

The map lists managed sites, their connections, audit log summary, and high-level statuses of site interconnections, and other objects.

Sites

Providing users with a quick overview of the sites managed by Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, including inventory details, connections to other sites, and general information.

Tenants

Users can view the various types of templates associated with a specific tenant by hovering over each block.

Templates

Offering users template (group of network policies) statistics, which are broken down into status by type, state, and status.

Inventory

Providing users with a structured breakdown of inventory, categorizing it into controllers, switches, interfaces, and L3 neighbors.

User Testing and Impact

Following several rounds of iterations involving all stakeholders, once the designs were finalized, our research and marketing team employed them to gather feedback from our customers.

35%

Enhanced High-Level Overview

Of users found it useful for quickly reviewing key insights. It also aided in understanding the status of the NDO instance.

25%

Easy to Identify Critical Configuration

Of users found it simple to identify sites, tenants, or policies needing attention, whether for configuration or deployment purposes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we met our goal of providing a clear overview of the Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO) instance. Users can now quickly grasp key details like template deployment, related sites, and template issues.

As a result, it simplifies understanding network operations and settings, enabling users to make better decisions and enhance network performance more effectively.

Let's Connect

Feel free to reach out for a design chat or simply to drop a "Hi!" - I'm all ears!

Copyright © Shruti Nanajkar 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Let's Connect

Feel free to reach out for a design chat or simply to drop a "Hi!" - I'm all ears!

Copyright © Shruti Nanajkar 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Let's Connect

Feel free to reach out for a design chat or simply to drop a "Hi!" - I'm all ears!

Copyright © Shruti Nanajkar 2024. All Rights Reserved.