Meraki Summary Reports

Anomalies monitor an organization's network in real-time, proactively alerting IT professionals to any abnormal behavior, with recommendations on how to resolve or optimize issues.

Background

More than 802,000+ enterprise networks rely on Cisco Meraki's cloud network to keep their business running. The Meraki Dashboard allows network administrators to monitor and control applications, users and devices in real time. I was tasked with understanding how network admins use reporting data on Dashboard, particularly on the Summary Report page. I worked on the research, interaction design, visual design and front-end development.

Customer feedback on the original Summary Report page.

Research

I partnered with an engineer and one other designer to understand how customers use the current Summary Report page. Together, we interviewed 14 users from varied industries and organization size. Here's a few key insights we uncovered:

• Users at smaller organizations tend to visit the page infrequently (about once a month), while larger customers often view it at least once a day.
• Heavy Dashboard users tend to use the page to identify bandwidth and hardware issues before they become a larger problem.
• Users tend to glance at graphs first to look for peaks or valleys that might warrant further investigation.
• Many users take screenshots of content on the page for monthly or quarterly reporting.
• Most users are not aware of the ability to set up scheduled email reports.

Whiteboarding common user flows for key personas.

Exploration & Wireframes

Iteration 1

In the first iteration, I wanted to test an assumption that users categorize the data as usage, clients and applications. Rather than adding more metrics, I took the existing content on the page and organized it into the three segments.

Iteration 2

During the second round of user testing, I learned that users aren't only interested in spotting peaks or valleys in graphs, but also want to understand how their network is performing based on historical data. In this iteration, I explored ways to show data trends through anomalies. For example, if usage for a client device is abnormally high, an alert could be triggered that also provides relevant data for the user to dig into if they're interested.

Development

• Users at smaller organizations tend to visit the page infrequently (about once a month), while larger customers often view it at least once a day.
• Heavy Dashboard users tend to use the page to identify bandwidth and hardware issues before they become a larger problem.
• Users tend to glance at graphs first to look for peaks or valleys that might warrant further investigation.
• Many users take screenshots of content on the page for monthly or quarterly reporting.
• Most users are not aware of the ability to set up scheduled email reports.

Summary Report

Anomalies

Anomalies monitor an organization's network in real-time, proactively alerting IT professionals to any abnormal behavior, with recommendations on how to resolve or optimize issues.