Cisco AppDynamics – Lead Product Designer

Simplifying a complex set up process

Helping users set up application monitoring

You use the internet for watching videos, sending emails, and storing photos. "The cloud" stores and manages all this data. It's a network of powerful computers in large data centers worldwide.

Cisco Cloud Observability (CCO) acts like a high-tech security system for the cloud. It provides tools for cloud managers who are like digital janitors. They use the tools to fix issues to keep your online experience fast and uninterrupted. It's like security cameras making a building safe and well-managed.

You use the internet for watching videos, sending emails, and storing photos. "The cloud" stores and manages all this data. It's a network of powerful computers in large data centers worldwide.

Cisco Cloud Observability (CCO) acts like a high-tech security system for the cloud. It provides tools for cloud managers who are like digital janitors. They use the tools to fix issues to keep your online experience fast and uninterrupted. It's like security cameras making a building safe and well-managed.

CCO can monitor a company's applications and cloud infrastructure

Slow start for new customers

CCO was the flagship application for the Cisco Observability Platform. Yet, CCO had a problem. It took customers and users months to realize the value of CCO. It was affecting our reputation and revenue. We lost a few deals due to this problem. One of the main issues was the setup process. I initiated and led a project to help solve this problem. I collaborated with content design and user research on the solution. I also partnered with product management and engineering to get it implemented.

Room for improvement

I started with auditing the setup process to find areas of improvement. In parallel, user research interviewed internal teams to understand the full process. We combined our findings into a presentation to the product management team. In our organization, they decide projects based on business or customer needs. After the presentation, they decided that this would be a high-priority project. It was the first UX-led project.

Plan of action

Working with the content designer, I created a new onboarding experience. The goal was to reduce reliance on documentation or customer support for setting up CCO. To achieve this goal, we provided admins a questionnaire on first login. Based on their answers, they received recommended next steps. When we reviewed the solution with the engineering team, we had to scale back the first release. The questionnaire wasn't built due to limited resources. Instead, we provided recommended next steps after first login.

Welcome to CCO

First-time users are shown a modal carousel that introduces the product since not all users will know what this product does

Advertisement: Customized set up

On the start page the user is shown a banner that gives them the option of answering questions to get a tailored onboarding experience

Get started – Introduction

Users are explained the benefits of completing the 'Get started' form

Get started – Review

Users are shown a summary of the answers to the 3 questions before saving

Recommended steps

The users are returned to the start page and shown a list of suggested next steps

Starting step 1

Empty state telling the user to add a data connection

Get data into the product

User is guided through the steps of creating a data connection to AWS, the provider they selected in the 'Get started' form

Confirmation step 1 is complete

Info toast informing user that a connection has been created and providing an estimated time before data is available

Step 1 marked done

Confirming again to the user that step 1 is complete

Measuring success

Aside from delivering designs for the onboarding experience, I also came up with success metrics. The goal was to monitor the performance of the experience and see if anything needs to be improved. My plan was to use these metrics to see:

If users are actually using these components
If users are completing the workflows; if not, where do most drop off
If users are completing onboarding; if not, how far do they get

Leveraging my previous career experience, I came up with tracking requirements. The goal was to create a single source of truth for any audience, e.g. engineering, product management, design.

Legacy

Unfortunately, the company decided to stop selling CCO shortly after the first release. Despite the decision, the project did have an impact:

The onboarding experience became the standard for onboarding AppDynamics products
It provided designers with a starting point for designing onboarding workflows
Within the organization, it was one of the projects that opened the door for other UX-led projects

victor@iamvictorlin.com