I am a Design Thinker
WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING?
"Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” — Tim Brown, president and CEO.
"Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” — Tim Brown, president and CEO.
|
WHAT DO I DO AS A DESIGN THINKER?
I help Cisco teams create empathic solutions built on intelligent networks that solve customers' challenges with design thinking. I feel strong influencing empathy among Cisco's diverse teams and help them discover opportunities, define the most important problems to solve and explore novel solutions for our customers. I believe, when Play and Work tangles magic happens. By magic I mean, meeting the business goals by aligning on core requirements, design principles and project priorities in a timely manner. As design thinking leader, I am “ The Space Maker” and “The Witness” for domain experts to feel safe to crack out of their cocoons and show up with their genius. |
|
Design Thinking Workshop with Cisco Customers.
San Jose, CA October 2017
Cisco Google Design Sprint with PM, ENG & UX
San Jose, CA March 2019
3 Day Cisco SPA UX Unification Workshop
San Jose, CA April/May 2019
Left: Cisco Design Thinking Book
Middle: Evangelizing Design Thinking at DevNet Design Thinking Booth at Cisco Live 2018, Orlando, FL
Right: Teaching Design Thinking to Cisco customers & partners at Cisco Live 2019 Tech Seminar San Diego, CA
Bottom: Cisco Design Thinking templates
Once upon a time, I was also a User Experience Designer...
Showcase: Cisco Smart Care Service, 2015
PROJECT GOAL
The objective of Smart Care Service is to help Cisco Partners become their customers' trusted network adviser by providing a comprehensive support offering.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
RESULT
Improved user workflows, provided information that is relevant to users, migrated the portal into a user friendly platform.
“ One of the frustrations I had with current Smart Care was how many different views there are so I like the uniformity.” User
“ This is nice, very well done. This tells you everything in one shot. (Device Details)” User
" I like this because Hostname, IP Address, Serial Number and Product ID, the descriptive factors of a device are all visible across the board and appears in all subsets consistently.” User
ROLES I PLAYED AS A USER EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
LESSONS I LEARNED
Take great notes. Taking great notes during each discussion and sharing them with the team is very resourceful for everyone. Because, there are million discussions that happened with product managers everyday for different parts of the service. While we moved so quickly to discuss the next requirement, because of world wide team co-location not all of the engineering team members were represented on those calls. By taking really good notes, I was not only able to help respond some of the technical questions from development, which helped me gain technical credibility and I was invited to every meeting and cc'ed on emails as part of the engineering team, but also taking great notes helped the co-located team members feel more inclusive and be on the same page with US Team.
Be the person you want to have in the team. There was no design project manager who would keep track of all the different moving pieces for me, so playing one helped me keep sane and move the project forward and coordinate between users, technical lead, product managers, and developers.
Being transparent and inviting project team to take part in design thinking process builds trust.
Being a design evangelist requires inclusiveness. It is better to have the different members of the team be present in user sessions, even though it compromised the "purity" of some of the user testing sessions, we were able to debrief right after each session and attack the problem area by incorporating user feedback super quickly.
RECOGNITION I RECEIVED FOR MY CONTRIBUTION
"Thank you for your intense focus on the partner needs and wanting to bring their input into the Smart Care-Cisco Smart Services Connection migration project. You were the first team to engage Pilot partners in the iterative co-development process so as to get early feedback and built that into the product. For the first time in SC, you were able to push new features to production every 3 weeks. This is an amazing accomplishment given all the challenges around doing releases. I wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge the whole team for this awesome job!! " Shalika Pargal, Cisco Smart Care Product Manager
SOME OF THE DELIVERABLES I PRODUCED & EXAMPLES OF DESIGN PROCESS ARTIFACTS
The objective of Smart Care Service is to help Cisco Partners become their customers' trusted network adviser by providing a comprehensive support offering.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
- Help Cisco Partners speed time to market by improving their user experience.
- Design a tool that supports Cisco Partners with Cisco intellectual property and infrastructure in order to manage services for their customers.
RESULT
Improved user workflows, provided information that is relevant to users, migrated the portal into a user friendly platform.
“ One of the frustrations I had with current Smart Care was how many different views there are so I like the uniformity.” User
“ This is nice, very well done. This tells you everything in one shot. (Device Details)” User
" I like this because Hostname, IP Address, Serial Number and Product ID, the descriptive factors of a device are all visible across the board and appears in all subsets consistently.” User
ROLES I PLAYED AS A USER EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
- Design Project Manager: Coordinated information between users, engineers and product managers. Helped plan and prioritize project timelines.
- Researcher: Conducted interviews with Cisco Partners to understand their needs and pain points. Conducted usability testing on conceptual designs and validated the screens with users and lead debriefing user feedback sessions.
- Facilitator: Helped product managers prioritize and define requirements by hosting design meetings 3 times a week.
- Interaction Designer: Created workflows and user interface specifications to integrate Smart Care Service into Cisco Smart Services Connection.
- Visual Designer: Created visual specifications for developers.
LESSONS I LEARNED
Take great notes. Taking great notes during each discussion and sharing them with the team is very resourceful for everyone. Because, there are million discussions that happened with product managers everyday for different parts of the service. While we moved so quickly to discuss the next requirement, because of world wide team co-location not all of the engineering team members were represented on those calls. By taking really good notes, I was not only able to help respond some of the technical questions from development, which helped me gain technical credibility and I was invited to every meeting and cc'ed on emails as part of the engineering team, but also taking great notes helped the co-located team members feel more inclusive and be on the same page with US Team.
Be the person you want to have in the team. There was no design project manager who would keep track of all the different moving pieces for me, so playing one helped me keep sane and move the project forward and coordinate between users, technical lead, product managers, and developers.
Being transparent and inviting project team to take part in design thinking process builds trust.
Being a design evangelist requires inclusiveness. It is better to have the different members of the team be present in user sessions, even though it compromised the "purity" of some of the user testing sessions, we were able to debrief right after each session and attack the problem area by incorporating user feedback super quickly.
RECOGNITION I RECEIVED FOR MY CONTRIBUTION
"Thank you for your intense focus on the partner needs and wanting to bring their input into the Smart Care-Cisco Smart Services Connection migration project. You were the first team to engage Pilot partners in the iterative co-development process so as to get early feedback and built that into the product. For the first time in SC, you were able to push new features to production every 3 weeks. This is an amazing accomplishment given all the challenges around doing releases. I wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge the whole team for this awesome job!! " Shalika Pargal, Cisco Smart Care Product Manager
SOME OF THE DELIVERABLES I PRODUCED & EXAMPLES OF DESIGN PROCESS ARTIFACTS
Showcase: Cisco Network Optimization Services Online Program, 2014
PROJECT GOAL
The objective of NOS Online Program is to transform today's document-based deliverables to more dynamic, interactive and customizable, customer-relevant online deliverables.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
RESULT
Single source of truth tool with improved workflows.
“Our availability has easily increased ten-fold. There are no more outages, no more tickets to deal with, and no more coordinating fixes. As a result, we can now concentrate our resources toward more value-added tasks versus constant troubleshooting.” Cisco
ROLES I PLAYED AS A USER EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
LESSONS I LEARNED
Participatory design activities are fun. Co-creation is powerful. User experience is everybody's responsibility.
RECOGNITION I RECEIVED FOR MY CONTRIBUTION
"We really appreciate your non-stop energy, enthusiasm and ability to run a tight ship amidst such a challenging group. We admittedly tried to cover almost too much ground in this last workshop, but came through not only with the crucial participation and alignment from Advanced Services to validate and fine tune our Online Deliverable requirements, but we came back with NCE enthusiasm for tools that I haven't seen in a while - and I attribute it solely to you and your megaphone! (OK, maybe not the megaphone)." Paul Roberts, Cisco NOS Online Product Managers.
"NOS Online is complex service with many stakeholders. You kept your eyes on the goal of improving the overall experience for customers and NCEs. The exceptional SUS score of 89 is a testimonial of your intense focus. Great job done!" Zoe Hu, Cisco CSTG User Experience Manager
SOME OF THE DELIVERABLES I PRODUCED & EXAMPLES OF DESIGN PROCESS ARTIFACTS
The objective of NOS Online Program is to transform today's document-based deliverables to more dynamic, interactive and customizable, customer-relevant online deliverables.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
- Information overload: Users need to be presented information that is relevant to them.
- Inconsistent workflows: Too many tools with too different workflows is not productive.
- Unfriendly user interface: Existing platform was not user friendly and the learning curve was too high.
RESULT
Single source of truth tool with improved workflows.
“Our availability has easily increased ten-fold. There are no more outages, no more tickets to deal with, and no more coordinating fixes. As a result, we can now concentrate our resources toward more value-added tasks versus constant troubleshooting.” Cisco
ROLES I PLAYED AS A USER EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
- Researcher: Conducted interviews with Network Consulting Engineers to gain empathy and to understand user's ecosystem. Conducted usability testing on conceptual designs and validated the content and new interface with users.
- Facilitator: Designed a Two Day Participatory Design Thinking Workshop. Hosted and facilitated the workshop with 35 users from around the world. Co-created conceptual wireframes with users. Helped product managers prioritize and define requirements.
- Interaction Designer: Created workflows and user interface specifications to integrate the new NOS Online Program Platform into Cisco Smart Services Connection.
LESSONS I LEARNED
Participatory design activities are fun. Co-creation is powerful. User experience is everybody's responsibility.
RECOGNITION I RECEIVED FOR MY CONTRIBUTION
"We really appreciate your non-stop energy, enthusiasm and ability to run a tight ship amidst such a challenging group. We admittedly tried to cover almost too much ground in this last workshop, but came through not only with the crucial participation and alignment from Advanced Services to validate and fine tune our Online Deliverable requirements, but we came back with NCE enthusiasm for tools that I haven't seen in a while - and I attribute it solely to you and your megaphone! (OK, maybe not the megaphone)." Paul Roberts, Cisco NOS Online Product Managers.
"NOS Online is complex service with many stakeholders. You kept your eyes on the goal of improving the overall experience for customers and NCEs. The exceptional SUS score of 89 is a testimonial of your intense focus. Great job done!" Zoe Hu, Cisco CSTG User Experience Manager
SOME OF THE DELIVERABLES I PRODUCED & EXAMPLES OF DESIGN PROCESS ARTIFACTS