Cisco Systems, Inc., is an American multinational tech corporation that develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, software, and telecom equipment. One of its SaaS products is XDR, an extended threat detection software designed for Security Analysts.

As the security field has grown, so has Cisco, and after a period of product acquisition, they found themselves with a range of visually inconsistent offerings. To tackle the reskining and merging of products, they needed fresh eyes to help sort, strategize, and create a uniform experience.

I worked as a contractor for Cisco for about a year, working closely with another contractor. Working under a UX Lead at Cisco, we led the Secure Cloud Analytics merge into XDR and reskinned multiple flows using their Magnetic design system.

Over 25 designers on one product 🧩

The team working on this software was more extensive than I have experienced. In addition, a few challenges arose as contractors were not fully embedded within the internal system. I worried this would lead to design inconsistencies, slower handoffs, or friction within a true agile flow.

• We only had access to some of the resources as the other designers.
• We were not able to communicate directly with the dev team.
• Sometimes, two people were working on a single product screen because of its complexity.

A new internal resource.

Taking matters into my own hands, I designed a custom “Design Operations” handbook for the contractors. It was a multi-page guide about file organization, page labels, design standards and annotation style.

The goal was to efficiently and professionally hand off designs to the larger groups of the Cisco organization. I wanted our work to be indistinguishable from other designers’ work to ensure product quality.

Hand-off Designs in Figma ☑️

An example of a final screen with annotations.

We provided multiple design states and dark-mode for every flow.

A few final designs.

"Great design requires great processes. Design operations are the bridge between good design and scaling it effectively."

— Kristin Skinner, Co-author of "Org Design for Design Orgs":
Building and Managing In-House Design Teams,

Going forward

Once we started designing with the Design Ops guide, we never received any screens back from the dev or product teams, which was great news. This meant we could seamlessly maintain their agile flow.

In due time, XDR had positive reactions when released at a cyber security conference, was featured in CRN’s top ten cybersecurity tools of 2023 and won a UX Design award for its simplicity and empowering novice security analysts.

Featured in CRN.

Featured in UX Design Awards.

Interested in more case studies?