Cisco Webex App Hub
During my tenure at Cisco, one of the significant projects I led as a UX designer was the development of the Cisco Webex App Hub. This initiative aimed to create a central hub where users could seamlessly discover integrations and bots to enhance their experience with the Cisco Webex Teams app.
Company: Cisco
My Role: Lead Designer
Timeline: 6 Months (2016)
Responsibilities: Design Direction
high-level flow diagrams
UX Design
Prototyping
My Role
As the lead UX designer for the Cisco Webex App Hub, I was responsible for spearheading the design process from conception to implementation. Additionally, I had the opportunity to design the Bots & Integration feature for Cisco Spark (now known as Cisco Webex Teams). My role involved collaborating closely with cross-functional teams including product managers, developers, and fellow designers to ensure the successful delivery of the project.
Cisco Webex App Hub Flow Diagram
My approach to designing the Cisco Webex App Hub involved thorough research, by conducting comprehensive competitor analysis and understanding user needs, I ensured that our solution would be intuitive and efficient.
I initiated the creation of high-level flow diagrams, exemplified below, to analyze user actions such as adding, removing, or modifying integrations. This process allowed me to assess the efficiency of each task by determining the number of steps required and identifying potential user actions at each stage.
Webex App Hub Website
As part of this project, we undertook the development of a marketplace website. The accompanying PDF provides a detailed overview of the wireframes and flow. Within the PDF, I outlined various user actions, including adding an integration via Webex room, configuring it on the App Hub website, and modifying or removing integrations. Additionally, I designed the layout for the Bot page, illustrating how users can access bot categories and manage them by adding or removing them as needed.
Cisco Webex Mobile Web
In addition to developing the Desktop version of the App Hub website, I also ensured compatibility with mobile devices through responsive design. Detailed within the documentation is the user experience on the mobile web version, illustrating how users can seamlessly access the App Hub and perform actions such as adding, removing, or modifying integrations and bots.
These samples showcase the website following the collaboration between the UI designer and myself, where the UI designs were refined based on the foundation laid by my UX design.
Bots
Working on the Bots feature during my time at Cisco was both engaging and crucial. Bots serve as pivotal tools for automating tasks within a product, and it was imperative for Cisco Spark to incorporate this functionality, especially from a competitive standpoint against platforms like Slack or Hipchat. Our objective was clear: establish a robust Bots API, enabling developers both within and outside of Cisco to create bots for the Spark platform (now known as Cisco Webex Teams).
At the time, to kickstart the project, I conducted extensive competitive analysis, studying the implementation of Bots in various applications such as Slack, Hipchat, and Telegram. This provided valuable insights into industry trends and best practices. Subsequently, I delved into the intricate details of the project, exploring questions around platform architecture, specifications, and the variety of bot types we should support.
Developing this feature posed unique challenges, with the foremost being the creation of a user-friendly bot experience that resonated with all users and minimized confusion. Given the diverse user base for Bots – including external engineers and consumers – our focus was on crafting a seamless path for both types of users.
Once the parameters were defined, I embarked on conceptualizing an illustrative bot, dubbed the Weather Bot, which exemplified simplicity. The objective was clear: to establish a platform that offered external engineers ample flexibility to design their bots with maximum user-friendliness.
Presented here are wireframes detailing the process of adding a bot to the Cisco Spark Mobile App.