Staying in the Green

Designed a core product feature to help admins and developers better track and manage their cloud costs

Feb 2019 – Aug 2019

The opportunity
IT admins and developers struggle to keep track of cloud spend across services, frequently going over budget and asking for more funds from the Finance department.
The outcome
Established the end to end experience for cloud cost budgets, including budget creation, reports and notifications.
Skills
Interaction Design
Research: Interviewing & Think Alouds
Data Visualization Prototyping

Cost Optimizer

Cisco CloudCenter Suite is a hybrid multicloud management platform.

​I was one of two designers working on Cost Optimizer, a module within the Suite that provided users with insights into how much they were spending on cloud services. I led the end-to-end design for a core feature, budgets.

It’s common for organizations to deploy their apps on all public cloud providers - AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, as well as their own private clouds.  

There’s a need to have a one-stop shop where costs are aggregated, and IT departments can see all the cloud resources they’re using, including costs incurred.  

Current solutions are difficult to use and it's not easy to get the information users are looking for.

"Pilot’s philosophy around categorization was one where the customer was not bothered unless absolutely necessary."

Budget creation

Budget creation workflow with error states
  • Department hierarchy is collapsible/expandable.
  • Users can easily navigate through the structure and allocate a budget to any node.
  • Reference information provided about historical cost per node as a reference for determining an appropriate budget amount.
  • ‘Smart’ allocation: auto-sums parent nodes to show if budget is allocated to a child node within; communicates status to the user if numbers don’t add up, or if there is an unallocated amount remaining.

Budget Reports

Bullet chart states

Process

Sketches

Low-fi wireframes