In this episode of Principled, Lindsey Wallace talks about how her team seeks to create a unified policy of common elements for Cisco Secure products to make them easier to use. Lindsey’s goal is to 10x people’s time and not add to their cognitive load, making things clear and simple to use.
“One of the big problems is the system is not systematic, right?” says Cisco Secure Director of Design Research and Strategy Lindsey Wallace. “It doesn't make sense how all this stuff plays together. How do I work across these tools? The same feature might be called one thing in one tool and something somewhere else. And so that's really not like a simplification problem in the sense of taking something away or making the UI prettier.”
Along with insights on her approach to creating a unified policy of elements and strategies for improving cross-functional team collaboration, Lindsey shares the expertise she’s looking for when hiring new team members. A few essential skills: lots of experience writing research plans and researching and analyzing data. Like Lindsey, who has a PdD in anthropology, many researchers on her team have advanced degrees in behavioral and social science. “It's really important to have people who have that expertise and experience and training in how to frame questions in ways that are not leading.”
Listen to Lindsey’s complete conversation (15 minutes) on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Audible, and Soundcloud, where you’ll also find other Principled podcasts and can access episode transcripts.
