Joining and leaving, sharing contents, controlling meeting, receiving notifications are essential user actions in the Cisco Video Conferencing Collaboration Room. I led the product design to a new way of how users engage & communicate in-meeting.
Lead a design squad
Agile product delivery - Develop on Cadence, Design concept development
User Journey and Wireframe, IA and UI
Visual/interaction design language
Prototyping & Conducting usability testing
Design thinking and Customer centricity
Remote/on-site user research & analysis
UX Vision and Roadmap
Shaping the design culture
Cisco Global Design Community, Cisco Telepresence Server team
TelePresence - Collaboration Room Endpoints, WebEx Rooms
The inconsistent design breaks user experiences. However, most of the other conferencing products at Cisco were working in silos that leaving customers confused, put out and thus complaining.
There are lots of touchpoints that have TelePresence at Cisco, and it’s products. Telepresence Server was a core technology to mainstream video and audio conferencing in one place from all other Cisco collaboration endpoint products/devices. We've received all the customer's dissatisfaction, and it damaged customer experience.
UX Challenge - Design a better way to easily track in-meeting progress and respond to in-meeting "moments" (e.g. quickly understand security status, mute others easily), a strong desire for UI consistency and simplification; an intuitive, "natural," "one-click" experience.
The first designer in the team - I started to research business/ products, technology and our customers by gathering the current artefacts through the interview with stakeholders, customer service centre and engineers.
Design thinking - with both internal and external customers
Approach:
• Design thinking workshop with customers - Listened customer’s pain points, recommendation and co-created scenario to prepare to new digital transformation.
• Identified key user personas and their roles
• Merged business and user goals leading to migration
• Identified usability related problems with the current system
• Considered expansion goals of the business and the customer
Co-creation and design thinking workshop
Understanding about business and technology - More sustainable and cost-effective solutions for on-premises conferencing.
Solving a legacy issue for today: There are millions of customers with current products. The customers were frustrated with inconsistent UI and behaviours also maintenance, and it will cause to terminate of licenses.
Migration of the legacy product into Cloud-based: Cisco IT needed to move all users from the on-premises conferencing solution to the new server. A new vision was needed to define how to cope with the fear of migration from our customers and set prioritised functionalities.
Ways of working in the team: The waterfall development process was extremely slow to respond to customer experience as this process undermined its usefulness in UX design. I introduced Lean UX for efficient product development.
Our vision - Enhancing a better way to deliver ‘One meeting experience everywhere for everyone.’
We co-created with cross-functional teams and customers that interact with other products. Our problem solving process followed:
Qualitative Research > Extracting Insights > Customer Experience Journey > Prioritising scope
Qualitative Research:
I conducted user interview with customers to better understand their needs, motivations and behaviours. We then synthesised insights that revealed underlying customer needs.
Key insights:
• We want one meeting that the USER can join in any way USER likes.
• The USER should not have to understand and choose between different technologies, but be able to join using the device or application of their choice.
Customer Experience Journey - Shared one vision:
I created an experience journey map for an overall digital video conferencing experience spanning multiple products.
Meeting experience user joureny map & Highlights in-meeting area
Solution ideation- There are a lot of expected/unexpected behaviours from the users during the meeting, like dropping off the call, the audio user is speaking in most video calls, chatting without a mute, asking permission to share contents or to join a meeting etc. Those dynamic interactions had to be attentive and intuitive.
Decision- making process: Sharing idea to stakeholders, engineers early also to customers
Sharing the early UX hypothesis to gain feedback built a better solution for customers.
Approach
•Using research insights, experience principles, and persona as prompts.
•Sketching for early feedback with engineers, product owners and other dependencies.
•Prototyped in the ultimate interactive prototyping tool - Framer, to represent those dynamic meeting behaviours quickly.
• Set Experience principles - rules for following in all other products after sharing ideal with product and design owners.
•Applied new design language into the real environments and demonstrated it to stakeholders and engineers - to think outside of the box.
Finding pain points & fears to identify the most critical areas to enhance the experience.
Identified experience principles:
• Secure and Reliable - Our user is secured and the data is encrypted that no fear to have a meeting
• Attentive but seamless - Noticeable important moments but no interruptions during a meeting
• Ease of use - Seamless experience and intuitive UI and ensuring scalability & accessibility for all users
• Engaging in human interaction - More important to see participant’s video for social conventions in the meeting
To engage a secure and reliable Audio participant's behaviour.
Insight
Security is a crucial part of video conferencing, and customers felt it was more important to see the participant’s video for social conventions in the meeting.
Idea
As a stepwise approach, we have improved audio participants experience. Telephonic icon described who called from audio only but it didn’t have a representation for who is not able to show their video. We’ve merged those idea into Audio avatar to indicate who are not able to show video and it has the same treatment with video user for active speaker’s behavior. We have expected to next evolution of audio avatar will be “Photo in avatar” that we will have a photo from active directory or initials from the caller’s ID.
Announcing when a user enters and waiting in the lobby.
Insight
As a host, I would love to know who is in the waiting room or who is joining/leaving.
Interaction
New participants joining always appear on the right-hand side of the PiP strip, if the active speaker is on the right when someone is video announced the active speaker will be moved to one to the left, the least speaker will be off the screen.
Optimising the screen real estate in a situation-based meeting and keep the relative placement of participant stable
Insight
The user wants to see as many participants as possible and to be able to change layouts depending on the type of meeting.
Idea
"No wasting space" creates an ultimate screen to embed more video participants first.
Video-centric layout design
Idea
As more audio participants join the overflow count will grow instead of showing them on screen.
1. Near-term:
Student support regardless of the locations
Needs statement:
As a student, I want to have an Instant access to student support content and services.
The problem:
The user have an issue with different timezone, access to resources, low bandwidth capacity and digital inequalities and that needs addressing
The question:
What improvements are required in IT support and Academic support to make it more suitable for online education?
2. Long-term:
Digital campus experience in one place
Needs statement:
As a student, I want to have one integrated online platform experience for the best academic performance.
The social experience, the face-to-face engagements and Hybrid model of education that has the potential to make college education more affordable for everybody.
The question:
How can we shift to a hybrid model as it is not just the students who are taking classes remotely, even the instructors are not forced teach classes from their home.
