Design System Research
The Challenge
The Cisco corporate website is contributed to by many internal teams and contains hundreds of pages. Aside from the core, high-profile pages, many portions of Cisco.com lack general consistency.
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The current design system isn't providing the best user experience, leading to projects taking longer to complete with excessive back-and-forth or teams branching from the design system entirely.
User Interviews
Research goal: Discover ways to improve the design system so people save time and produce better work.
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A colleague and I recruited and interviewed 17 Cisco internal employees across several teams in different roles.
Job Roles of participants
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Digital Strategists: 4
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Marketing Managers: 4
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Designers: 3
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Information Architects: 2
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Publishers: 2
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Content Strategists: 2
Cisco Longevity of participants
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0-2 years : 4
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3-6 years: 4
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7-10 years: 5
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10+ years: 5
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High-level questions
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Who are the primary users using the design system and what are their top tasks?
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Why are some users following the current design system and some not?
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What are the frustrations with the design system when put into practice?
Key Findings
We found many themes and common pain points rising up from the interviews.
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Information isn't shared - Many people didn't even know where to find design documentation.
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No one source of truth - Various documentation floating around made by different teams, and none of the documentation is fully comprehensive.
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Difficult to read and navigate - The official documentation is hosted on Wiki, which everybody agrees is an eye sore.
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No upkeep - Gaps and legacy components in the documentation because it's nobody's full-time job to update it.
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Design restrictions - The components often don't meet specific needs.
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UX becomes a bottle neck - Frustration with roles not being included in discussion early-on, so design just seems to get in the way when teams want to push things out the door.
User Personas
I consolidated the interview findings into four key personas.
Next Steps
The project ended here because I transferred to another team within Cisco, but these would have been the next steps:
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- Present my research and personas to get buy-in from higher-ups to secure resources.
- Evaluate the best platform to build a design system.
- Prioritize main features and draw out requirements for a design system MVP.