Cisco

Cisco User Experience Standards

• After decades of siloed application development, Cisco made an executive decision in the late 2000s to introduce user-centered design processes to the company. Cisco hired Cordell Ratzlaff (who was the first design manager for Apple's OS X operating system) to build a UX team that could unify the many disparate design languages in use at Cisco. The goal was to create a single design language that would be used across all of Cisco's products, from the tiniest scale of IoT products to the largest scale of immersive telepresence. This was the CUES team.
• While it was often a challenge to create design patterns that would scale from, say, management of home WiFi networks, to management of networks containing tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes, using the same fundamental components, we were largely successful in our efforts. The CUES design language survived for years within Cisco, and its influence can still be seen in Cisco products today.
• I wrote interaction design guidelines for a suite of reusable components used in dozens of Cisco products and applications.
• I created an Omnigraffle stencil toolkit used by Cisco interaction designers to create high fidelity wireframes that accurately convey the use of Cisco User Experience Standards, which our team published and maintained.
• I also carried out art direction for a library of several hundred photorealistic icons for use in Cisco applications.

Documentation for a Contextual Overlay component

Documentation for a Video Player component

Documentation for Chart components

More documentation for Chart components

Cisco icon library art direction guidelines