Designing with empathy
We listened to Cisco’s employees to make mobile security setup simple, quick, and transparent for 135,000 people.
Cisco supports secure remote work by providing employees with access to company email, intranet, and other resources on personal devices. For all 60,000 devices in use, each must be secured in Mobile Device Management (MDM) to keep Cisco and employees safe from threats and vulnerabilities.
When the MDM platform Cisco used for more than 12 years reached end of life, we chose Cisco Meraki SM to replace it. Yet, we didn’t want to push another mandatory upgrade on employees when we had the opportunity to improve their experience.
But why focus on empathy and experience? Consider this scenario of an employee who never setup mobile intranet access until it was needed for a critical customer meeting:
This scenario seems like it would be complicated or frustrating for anyone. But what if this employee was also blind, suffering from a mental illness, or a single parent with a sick child at home? What other external factors could also influence their experience? At some point, we’re all faced with important tasks, subject to mishaps, while managing circumstances out of our control.
Innovation with representation
I’m thankful Cisco offers resources to assist employees with life’s tough situations. With this project, I’d been given the opportunity to do the same.
No employee wants to feel at fault for compromising company data. But securing a device for work shouldn’t be harder than the work itself. By taking something stressful and making it delightful, we could actually improve people’s lives. But we couldn’t seat the 135,000 people who work at Cisco at one table, so it was my responsibility to represent them.
As a User Experience Designer wielding the human-centered approach to innovation known as Design Thinking, I discover real human needs to build things that people will love to use; design with empathy to improve inclusivity, mental health, and well-being; and create kick-ass solutions at the intersection of humanity, business, and technology.
I do these things as our team’s sole UX resource — with 4,000 miles between myself and the rest of our group.
Solve for one, extend to many
We can use this scenario to draw on an important lesson from Microsoft Design’s Inclusive Design methodology. By dismissing disabilities that are permanent (physically unable to go to the office), temporary (working from home with a minor cold), or situational (meeting at a customer site for the day) as “edge-cases”, it belittles someone’s human experience. Designing for all disabilities and situations results in solutions that benefit people universally.
In this employee’s scenario, the setup process would be easier (and would require a less complex solution) if she were in a Cisco office with access to the corporate network. But, if we assumed most employees worked from Cisco offices, how many people might we actually exclude?
As it turns out, a little less than half of our workforce often work from non-Cisco locations. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we saw that number rise to 95%!
Yet, this is only one factor in the equation. People, places, needs, urgency, and technology can impact a solution in different ways. We traced paths between many factors to visualize all potential journeys in one view. This helped uncover more influences and capabilities we’d need to consider.
Still, we needed a better understanding of our employees. We reviewed existing product feedback and support cases to uncover needs and pain-points. We could’ve saved time and resources by conducting user interviews sooner in the process; something we’ll remember for next time.
We couldn’t focus solely on employees, though. We had to consider the needs of all groups affected by our project.
Employee needs:
- Access to critical work tools (email, calendar, VPN) on personal devices
- Access to other work tools (apps, web tools, data )on personal devices
- Trust that Cisco isn’t snooping through personal info
- A reliable and simple way to adhere to Cisco’s device security standards
- Little/no interruption to existing mobile tools when enrolling a new device
Stakeholder needs:
- Replace end-of-life mobile device management (MDM) platform
- Provide access to Cisco’s internal mobile apps and services catalog
- Enforce security policies to protect employees and Cisco
- Reduce IT support caseload
- Support the Cisco’s business by using Cisco-owned technology
- Improve Cisco Meraki’s MDM product by partnering on their largest MDM deployment ever
Business needs:
- Provide the flexibility for employees to work remotely
- Limit exposure of company data on unsecured devices
- Limit risk of vulnerabilities for our customers, partners, and employees
Existing solutions
Rather than building something from scratch, we looked at what we already had.
- An instructional web tool (MyMobile) managed by Cisco’s Mobility team. Using MyMobile, employees could: self-enroll in MDM; setup Cisco email and intranet access; and install Cisco’s internal mobile app store. But employees on-board personal devices once every 1–6 years. They couldn’t easily find or remember where to start. The lengthy setup process also had its own hurdles.
- An internal mobile app store (eStore Apps). With a secure device, employees could use eStore Apps (for iOS or Android) to get other mobile resources built or curated by Cisco. Managed by Cisco’s Digital Marketplace team, “eStore” had brand recognition among employees as the place to get tools and services for work. Yet, MyMobile offered the most desirable mobile resources (i.e. email, intranet access) while eStore offered the rest.
Our teams saw an opportunity to join forces.
By creating an unified ‘Cisco eStore’ app to on-board personal devices and deliver apps we could: make setup fast and flexible, enforce more secure data policies, and use public app stores as the gateway to mobile work at Cisco.
Our mission was clear.
To support secure remote work, we would:
1. Provide an intuitive and transparent on-boarding process for employees to self-secure their personal devices;
2. Allow employees to obtain (or opt-out of) immediate access to the Cisco mobile apps, services, and data they’re entitled to; and
3. Improve data security, employee productivity, app findability, and user experience.
Interested to see how it turned out?
We listened to Cisco’s employees to make mobile security setup simple, quick, and transparent for 135,000 people. Here’s how we did it:
