Zaudhaus Design - Cisco Systems

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Cisco Systems
IronPort Gateway Security Systems Interface

We worked with IronPort in the very early stages to help them move away from their original command-line interface to a more visual, HTML-based user-interface. The goal was to create an administration interface that could present more information about the state of the Gateway in order to promote the benefits of the product. With a command line interface, sales people were having to simply wave their arms to explain the benefits.

Year Built: 2002
Project duration: 4 months
Zaudhaus role: Task Analysis, User-Workflow, Interface Design, Visual Design

Services
Interaction design, visual interface

Industries
Network Security, Client-Software

The Challenge: Probably the single most challenging part of this project was auditing a command-line interface and deciphering all the commands into a series of user-tasks that we could then turn into an interface design. Additionally, we needed to make the application at least as efficient as a command-line interface. We didn't want to anger the hard-core Engineers who were used to working very quickly with the hardware. If the interface got in the way, it wouldn't be accepted.

We developed a simple task-based user model where many of the settings that were changeable on the hardware were just a single-click away. The most complex feature we had to develop was a command for setting up a filtering engine for different types of spam. We developed a visual modeling tool that could basically allow the administrator to construct a script, but in a very easy to understand way. An example is shown on this page.