Designing Compliance Reporting in CX Cloud
Background
Started as the sole and youngest designer leading Network Compliance for CX Cloud and it all began with a simple question: How can we make compliance data more efficient and easy to consume?
Fuelled by this vision, I took the initiative to start working on Compliance Reports — a project that wasn’t originally on my plate, but one that I knew could add significant value. What began as a self-initiated idea soon grew into a major focus, and I pitched it to senior leadership, product managers, and engineers. This move not only helped me grow as a designer but also revealed key insights and challenges along the way.
Timeline: 1 Month
Role: Solo UX Designer
Collaboration Involved: Engineers, Product Managers
Responsibility: Designing and prototyping the experience end-to-end
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Problem Domain
Cisco CX Cloud serves as a comprehensive customer experience platform, providing networking insights and proactive management for enterprises. One of the crucial features customers demanded is compliance reporting. Current challenges faced by Cisco CX Cloud customers include:
- Difficulty in generating real-time compliance reports.
- Time-consuming to read through complex tables of compliance data.
- Lack of integration with AI for predictive and dynamic insights.
Compliance reports are vital to ensure that businesses adhere to regulatory standards & security policies. They are also crucial in streamlining auditing processes with regular reports providing transparency to stakeholders and regulators regarding operational integrity.
How might we introduce the generation of compliance reports in CX Cloud to ensure adherence to regulatory standards and accountability?
KPIs that Led My Journey: From the very start, I knew that design decisions would need to be kept rooted in measurable goals. They were focused on their potential success and definition of the project i.e.
1. Report Generation Time
2. Steps for Task Completion
3. Compliance Audit Success Rate
Discovery
To kickstart the project, I analyzed existing research work done within Cisco which revealed some key user needs which helped me make data backed decisions.
Analysing Competitors:
I also compared more than 10 compliance reporting tools of major competitors in the network management space with key highlights from:
• Palo Alto Networks: Robust compliance tracking capabilities are not featured with AI predictive features.
• Fortinet: Uses real-time compliance reporting, but leaves little customization up to the user.
• Splunk: Renowned for its data visualization and reporting capabilities, but the configuration is tricky and lacks mid-tier customer automation.
Ideation
I started brainstorming and gathering requirements from the existing research as to how AI could make the experience better. I explored features like auto-generated reports, scheduling reports, customizable templates, and making intuitive dashboards from an existing report. In this process, several challenges and critical questions arose in my mind.
Thoughts and challenges:
1. Value of AI Integration: In what ways might AI help deliver predictive insights and auto-reporting without burdening the end-user with undue complexity?
2. Personalization vs. Automation: The difficulty of offering automated reports while making them customizable where users can design their reports according to a specific compliance requirement.
3. User Navigation Patterns: How can one make the navigation oriented for a user who requires fewer clicks to set up, configure, and run reports in the shortest possible time?
4. Accessibility of Reports: The reports to be produced must be accessible and actionable for various stakeholders.
Conceptualisation
Regarding the flow of compliance reporting, it became imperative to make a journey map that reveals the wide steps which the respondents take to track specific touch points. Post this I created different user flows, and the number of clicks required for each of the given task was monitored. In this way, I was able to determine which of the flows are most effective for the end users.
Using ideation methods like Crazy 8 and rapid sketching, I generated 10 initial concepts. Through multiple rounds of feedback and peer review with fellow designers, I iteratively refined these ideas. This process allowed me to distill the concepts down to the most efficient solution.
Visual Design
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The look and feel of the visuals has been brought to life by using robust Figure8 design system and here’s a glimpse of it.
Takeaways!
1. Leadership and Initiative: Since it was the first time for me to execute the project solo as a lead, I realised that initiating action is very important; you could easily throw your ideas at the senior leadership and take the buy-in from some key stakeholders.
2. Feedback from various stakeholders: Having taken feedback from users, product managers, and engineers in phases, I gradually improved on the project to meet each requirement in order to deliver a user-centric solution.
3. Adaptability to Change: The most significant lesson learned was to cope with changing timelines and shifting priorities and not lose focus from the core of the project.
Impact & Next Steps
What started as a self initiated project soon grew to leading design for Global Reports. It also sparked the idea to migrate customers from Cisco legacy tools to CX Cloud and give them a unified experience!
Preksha, great work to present the report design! I am impressed by your capability at the early stage of your career. I love the fact that reports finally gets into a formal discussion with what you have considered in many aspects.
— Principal Architect @Cisco
