Cisco has over 150 products with user interface aspects. Most product teams did not have sound User Centered Design (UCD) methods ingrained into their software development lifecycle, resulting in inconsistent user interfaces, outdated interface styles and behaviors, and high support costs directly related to usability. As the central User Experience (UXD) Group, we devised several strategies to address this. These included simplifying integration of User Centered Design methods into Product User Interfaces, instrument a feedback loop to not only ensure that products embed sound UCD methods, but also that the designs are updated based on customer feedback and support case analyses. A layered approach to the design patterns and tools made our offerings applicable to broad range of products, without making them generic. Our work significantly impacted Cisco’s product user interfaces, and we were able to ingrain a culture of usability into the product development lifecycle. Many large enterprises are likely to face the same set of challenges; this paper is intended to help teams in similar situations.

We have been working on bcfg2, a configuration tool, for nearly 6 years. The design process of bcfg and bcfg2 has been interesting from an HCI perspective due to the overall manner in which it was conducted. While there was a substantial amount of system administration expertise available during the design process, HCI expertise was lacking. This meant that the design process, from a usability perspective, largely occurred organically, due to user feedback. During this organic design process, we have had a variety of issues requiring mediation between computer systems aesthetics and the interfaces required for users. Early on, we realized that usability was the key feature for configuration tools, and thus were able to prioritize the usability side of design tradeoffs. In this talk, I will give a few concrete examples of these issues and the architectural changes they motivated.