Simon Day
Selected Work
Mostly Corporate Enterprise
As a Principal Product Designer, I love to turn complexity into elegant simplicity and create solutions for applications, mobile, web, dashboards, and more. I have spent my most recent time in the networking and security space. This means I have lots of experience understanding and tackling tough design problems while handling complexity and ambiguity. This portfolio shares some of the solutions I have had the pleasure of working on. My contact information can be found in the header and footer of this site. Please feel free to reach out and say hello.
Cisco Crosswork Cloud
Three under one roof
Crosswork Cloud is a suite of three networking tools used by large service providers to ensure smooth running networks, allowing providers to deliver downstream internet services to millions of consumers. The first product, Traffic Analysis, tracks and visualizes network traffic flowing through and across a network. The second, Trust Insights, monitors network inventory while reporting OS versions, package information, and security issues such as unexpected changes. The last, External Routing Analytics, watches and alerts on the protocol and routing between large networks.
Share a home, or common experience?
In a suite of tools, it makes sense to pull common elements up to the platform level. Determining how and what to combine requires careful consideration. One such common element is rule or policy creation, which is shown here. Although common to all, it made more sense to break consistency and keep policy creation down at the individual application level as the rule sets were independent with unique specifics. However, ensuring a common creation pattern allows a suite user to predict how to write rules across the applications.
What shall we make?
Product requirements and features can be determined in various ways. One way the design team can help is by utilizing design methods such as participatory or co-design. Leading using a trifecta model, this telemetry feature is the result of a participatory design effort where I interviewed, synthesized, and crafted the asks into a highly valuable design. My role was to ensure the presented data was clear and understandable to the user. Validating with experts, then further with customers, assured us we on the right track.
Turning frustration into ease
Sometimes a feature request requires a new component to be developed. The detailed task of selecting multiple interfaces on multiple network devices is made even more complex when contained within a larger task, such as this rule creation workflow. Creating a micro task decreases cognitive load, reduces the chance of making mistakes, and can make the most complex tasks seem easier to accomplish.
Cisco DNA Center
Flagship Enterprise network suite designed to automate, monitor, and troubleshoot networks.
Show Me Where I Can Be Useful
The DNA Center is a flagship product created to set up, run, and troubleshoot large Enterprise networks. I influenced a few different areas of the multi-faceted application, such as clarifying the important information shared as dashboards. Understanding where network problems are occurring, shapes the effort and informs what to fix. Each of these two featured dashboards have a unique focus and give details about different areas. The first focuses on the clients connecting to the network and the second communicates health of the devices making up the network.
How Much Is Left?
In a large suite application, the container housing all the features can become an entity in itself commonly known as the platform. Handling licensing and compliance can be complicated for asset managers. I adopted, re-focused and led an international design team to simplify and streamline entitlement reporting. Collaborating closely with product managers and development we were able to present a rather overly complicated model by organizing the information architecture, creating clear distinctions between types, and presenting the information with composed visual communication.
Do No Harm
Uncovering a feature hole in the product, I spearheaded the fix to release with the ability to backup and restore. The notion of an enterprise product absent of the ability to repair itself when something goes wrong filled me with dread. I built a case and enlisted other designers, technical marketing engineers, and executive help to place pressure on the development team to take on the task. Designing a lean solution aided the engineering team to meet the existing release deadline, while ensuring our users were not disappointed.
Cut Through Clutter
Using AI or machine learning as a predictive tool, we incorporated the cutting-edge research of a explorative team into the application. Lots of data was generated from inspecting various elements of the network. The key was understanding what the data was saying and the work operators needed to do. I used architecture and visual design to curate the information into clear call-to-actions, rather than assuming the problem would surface by just viewing the data.
Cisco Cloud Web Security
Reimagined the creation of rules and policies used to control applications and network traffic.
Redesign Required
Cloud Web Security was an acquisition. The aging product had valuable features users relied on, but an unresponsive frontend development team—and other factors—prompted a redesign effort. The entire application was mapped, ensuring the entire feature set was cataloged. The application was re-architected and a new visual design language via an atomic pattern library was deployed for consistency and ease of development.
Order Matters
The main role of the application allows web traffic based on the polices of an organization. Writing these rules is what is called a first-match, meaning the list of rules is evaluated and stops when a match is found. The order of the rules becomes paramount as the intent of the organization can only be executed if actions are taken as expected. Clearly understanding what a rule will do, to whom, and when, is key in producing the correct order.
Clear Creation
We tested breaking rules down into a model of how + who + what + when. Reducing cognitive load with this easy framework permitted users to understand more easily what action the rule would have on web traffic, who it would affect, and when the rule would work. When we clarified where the rule would live in both the creation and editing process, our users were able to mentally visualize when this rule would fire.
Bring It All Together
Building a highly motivated international team tasked with bring it all to life was described as the gold standard of UX team interaction by our Director. Daily meetings and design check-ins helped build confidence with our development brothers. Building the design solution on UX principals paid dividends in user testing as the design held together as a coherent solution. The reusable design system also served as the launch of a team wide pattern library I created with the help of motivated frontend teammate.
Cisco Cognitive Threat Analytics
Forensic analysis product using AI to connect correlated threat events.
AI Correlated Threats
I integrated an acquisition of a Czech company, birthed from a cutting-edge research project, into our product suite. Anomalies were revealed by comparing a measured baseline with statistical traffic analysis. After an initial visual rebranding, we set about expanding the features and capabilities into a full-fledged product offering. Blue-sky designs, such as above, inspired the team to evolve the product in ways they had not previously considered.
What Is Next?
The use of AI to connect and correlate events was a breakthrough in forensic analysis. Determining seemingly low-level threats are connected can reveal they are actually part of a larger more malicious event. The distinction between a validated threat and those detected as bad, but lacking a secondary verification, was drawn to help order effort. Adding the ability to triage, sort, and see threat details, provided a methodic path to mitigate threats.
Deep Details
Sharing the full forensic analysis gives a full picture of each threat event. The team of researchers in the Czech Republic were constantly improving the underlying AI model, adding confidence in the data accuracy. Illustrating larger patterns of potentially affected devices, helps organizations understand, for instance, the urgency of a company wide software upgrade. This action protects from future infections, limiting the costly number of devices needing to be restored.
Mobile Triage
The potential urgency of threats propagating through a network led to ideating a mobile triage tool. Creating a design is a fairly lightweight commitment to an idea. Not much is lost if what is drawn lacks potential value. However, when the executive leadership team shares an idea and you are able to produce an educated solution, saying, “You mean like this?” That interaction is priceless as it elevates the entire team to allies, building hope and faith we can help build the future.
Sprite Design System
Multiple themed design system created to ensure accessibility and elegance.
Light Theme
Creating a design system ensured the frontend developers would reuse components to build pages. Minimizing the threat of one-off page development allowed us to push for a multi-theme system. Adding a theme was work, but it boiled down to defining another CSS stylesheet.The light theme was expected as a default as the palette followed the existing branding theme the closest.
High Contrast Theme
Inclusive design is democratic and empathetic by ensuring there is a way for everyone to use products. Also, laws may prevent governments from purchasing products failing accessibility standards. Creating a theme to handle the stark 7:1 text ratios required for AAA compliance allowed for subtlety and minimalism in the other themes. Do they all pass accessibility testing? Nope. Is the high contrast theme a visual delight? Absolutely not. Separating user needs by theme allowed each to be stronger by relying on each other.
Dark Theme
While being built, a dark theme for a pattern library was trendsetting. I personally love dark themes as I find them easier on the eye and they embrace the fact we are looking at emitted light rather than emulating sunlit objects in the real world. Brightness is added to the design toolbox, which can be used to communicate visual hierarchy on the page. Colors are understood as light, not reflected color off objects. This ties hues together so we see them as brighter or dim rather than different colors.
Charting
A well used chart turns data into insights. By reusing colors across the application we regained a full charting palette using color to communicate difference not status. Tables had a few text color changes representing status but as a reinforcing element rather than a primary visual crutch. Palette colors across themes were related but not duplicates. A color in one theme had a sister color in another, allowing for easy theme switching, theme—not paged-based—QA, and removed one-off colors entirely.
Not-so-Corporate Fun
A pencil in pixels and vector Illustrations
Simon Day
Product Designer
All the projects above are original work. There are lots of people I collaborated with along the way so, I can’t claim full ownership. I view design projects in a similar way as building products is a lot easier when the team feels invested in a shared direction. I used Framer to shaped this fully responsive, light and dark themed site from scratch to showcase my original images created in Figma. I laid out the site in Albert Sans typeface, which was created by Andreas Rasmussen.
Please feel free to reach out and get in touch with me. I love being a designer and I feel that fact shines through in this portfolio—Oh and, I have been many things but never an astronaut.