Selected Work:
Driving a 9% increase in customer expansion renewals, YoY, through rapid research and data-driven user-centered design for Admin and Super Admin users.
The AppDynamics Account Management Portal (AMP) is the central hub for license and access management across Cisco’s Full Stack Observability ecosystem. It serves thousands of enterprise users daily, allowing them to provision, forecast, and reconcile their software entitlements. But discoverability issues and lack of intuitive data visualizations weighed heavily on user sentiment, while using the Portal.
The Problem: Cisco AppDynamics introduced the Cloud Observability Platform (CCOP) — a cloud-native, OpenTelemetry-based monitoring tool. Unlike previous AppDynamics products, which were licensed per agent or vCPU, CCOP introduced a data ingestion-based licensing model.
”Admin and Super Admin users of the AMP need a straightforward user experience and intuitive data visualizations to help them understand the relationship between data ingestion and license consumption to evaluate the value of their subscription and right size future provisioning.”
Design Approach: Through User Interviews, A/B Testing, Feedback Sessions and Prototyping, I uncovered that we were conflating the Admin’s need for clarity around license availability and cost; they were two distinct needs, require two — not one — UX solution. I designed effective a user flow with intuitive data visualizations that would help the Admin improve forecasting accuracy.
Project Duration: Two months/ continuous dev.
My Role: Lead Product and UX Designer
Product: Licensing, Account Management Portal
Delivering full-stack observability to Cisco AppDynamics addressable market and saving organizations $350K/ hour through 0-1 like design of Event data investigation workflow.
Full-stack observability (FSO) means being able to correlate events from multiple domains regardless of the entities they're associated with. This was the promise of the Cisco Cloud Observability Platform, but the process wasn’t easy or intuitive.
The Problem: Due to microservice architecture and subsequent UI design, which organized and presented data objects for view by a construct referred to as (parent) ‘Entity’, Event data for a single Service or Application ended up being dispersed across that Service or App’s child entity pages.
Based on app or service complexity, users were switching between six or more UI pages to make sense of Event data and correlate across services.
Context-switching and toiling in the UI to investigate led to decision fatigue and reduced confidence, ultimately slowing down issue resolution.
Each minute of downtime costs companies ~$5,600, making every second count.
“When responding to alerts and health rule violations, SRE and DevOps users need a way to simultaneously view all Events over time — while maintaining relevant context — so they they can more quickly and confidently localize the potential root cause Event, resolve performance issues, and mitigate downtime.”
Design Approach: Through Secondary Research Synthesis, SME Interviews, Heuristic Assessment, Concept Testing, Feedback Session, and Prototyping I ideated on solutions and shipped an experience that reduced SRE toil in response to receiving and alert, and reduced the number of clicks for task success from a minimum of 6 to a maximum of 2, regardless of complexity.
Project Duration: 4 weeks to deliver phase 1
Role: Lead Product and UX Designer, Research
Product Area: Cloud Observability Platform
Socializing Spike Research to Influence AI Product Strategy: Reducing Mean Time To Value Through ML-Optimized Business Transaction Configuration.
Before: BT Configuration was a multi-task workflow, combining BT and Application configuration
After: (UXR Proposal) workflow simplified into two AI supported workflows
AppDynamics provides Application Performance Management (APM) for enterprises customers, allowing companies to monitor and optimize their software applications. A critical feature of the platform is Business Transactions (BTs)—a method for detecting, tracking, and visualizing application traffic flows. Research reveled that Business Transactions has long been a pain point for users:
Sales Engineers (SEs) reported that complex BT configuration was a dealbreaker for potential customers.
All users struggled to understand BT setup, leading to frustration and low feature adoption.
Inefficiencies in the workflow created barriers to renewal, impacting sales retention and customer satisfaction.
Findings:
Poor discoverability of BT configuration workflow created significant user friction, with users unable to reliably and efficiently locate critical functionality needed for product adoption.
Confusing terminology and lack of contextual guidance complicated an already complex data configuration task, extending onboarding times.
ML and GenAI opportunities remained stalled due to misaligned priorities, communication gaps, and need for UX alignment of business and user value to be gained.
Outcomes Influenced:
Secured dedicated Data Science resources to explore and develop ML-driven automation strategies for configuration workflows, reducing manual user effort.
Catalyzed design and content team efforts to reevaluate site navigation and Information Architecture, resulting in enhanced user experience and discoverability.
Project Duration: Two months
My Role: User Experience Researcher
Product: AppDynamics Controller, Business Transactions