Cisco
Design systems, Visual, & Motion for the Cloud 🦄
Cisco Customer Experience helps customers get full value from their investments, across cloud, IoT, and automation.
I interned at Cisco twice, improving the filtering experience for customers and enriching the visual identity through illustrative work.
Role
UX Design Intern, Visual Design Team
Timeline
May → Nov 2024, May → Aug 2023
Skills
Visual & Interaction, Illustration & Motion
Tools
Figma, After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop
A Glimpse Into My Work
Summer 2024
Frictionless filtering for power customers
Admin users on CX Cloud regularly monitor their network and cloud assets (products Cisco services to them) to manage their licensing and address advisories.
They often filter for the same groupings intermittently, but it's tedious and error-prone to repeat inputs for each query. I introduced a new “saved filter” experience where users can define groupings of filter conditions and access them easily over time.
I designed the flow and spec'd it for hand-off, refining it based on existing design system patterns.
Internal Resources & Tooling
On the side, I developed an internal guide for data visualization selection and best practices. With guidance from our visual designer, I recorded categorical and sequential color palette usage and pulled references from existing visualizations in CX Cloud.
A peek at some of the visuals I crafted for this guide!
Summer 2023
Iconography
I shipped 47 icons to Cisco Customer Experience Cloud's design system, Figure.8. Visualizing abstract, unfamiliar concepts proved difficult — what in the world is PSU Power Ratio?
Vector Illustration
I also created several illustrations for various projects, including Cisco's internal learning platform, ONEx Atlas.
I was tasked with interpreting real images into stylized drawings. I made several variants expressing different interpretations and styles. From those, I narrowed down to options best aligned with the existing visual language.
Reflection
I learned to wear many hats — regardless of if they fit at first.
01
Be a sponge
Designers on the team are incredible generalists, and I picked up small skills here and there — I came in without motion experience, but I dabbled in After Effects, working plugins like AEUX into my workflow.
02
Innovate within constraints
Designing for a product with well established libraries and guidelines proved to be a challenge. I sweated the details, making sure to understand existing usage patterns as I iterated through feature design.
03
Share imperfect work early.
For my second summer, I sought feedback early. As a result, I worked more efficiently—my colleagues pointed me towards old docs and files to reference that would've taken me a while to find otherwise!
#WeAreCisco
Huge thanks to my manager Steve, my mentor Chris, my co-intern Ginnie, and other design leaders on my team! I had a blast sharing Webex coffees with everyone ☕
