Licensing Portal Redesign

Consolidating 10+ Tools into One Unified Experience

The Challenge

Cisco’s licensing and contract management process was spread across more than 10 different tools. Internal teams, partners, and customers had to jump between portals to check license status, renew contracts, download software, or manage account access—resulting in wasted time, user frustration, and missed renewals.

  • Tools were designed to support internal departments rather than complete user workflows.

  • Frequent confusion over which portal handled what task

  • Conflicting data across systems made reporting and auditing unreliable.


The Outcome

By consolidating workflows into a single experience, we created a scalable platform that supports proactive license and contract management while enabling role-based actions and insight.

  • Reduced the number of systems users needed to interact with

  • Helped users stay ahead of renewals and support issues with timely alerts

  • Created a foundation for phased integration of future tools

My Role:

Senior UX Designer

  • Conducting user interviews across internal teams and partners

  • Auditing tools and mapping 20+ workflows

  • Developing personas and journey maps

  • Designing a role-based dashboard experience


Timeline:

July 2016 to February 2017

Key Users

To design a solution that worked across systems and roles, I interviewed 16 users to understand their key tasks and challenges. These insights helped me create three personas that reflected the most common entitlement workflows.

User Journeys

Creating role-based user journeys was essential to ensure the redesigned experience supported their distinct goals, tools, and challenges.

Design Principles

Guided by what we learned from users and system audits, we defined four principles to inform the design.

The four design principles guided every decision we made:

1.

Unification

Reduce fragmentation by consolidating tools into one view

2.

Personalization

Tailor the experience through role-based dashboards and account-level views

3.

Actionability

Make next steps clear with smart alerts and embedded tools like case creation and version upgrades

4.

Scalability

Design flexible systems that can support future entitlement actions

Wireframes to Solution

The wireframe phase focused on enabling a unified dashboard view for entitlements. We used early wireframes to test concepts aligned to specific user stories—like the ability to search across all entitlements, act on alerts, and personalize views. These sketches helped confirm feasibility with developers and refine expectations with stakeholders.

Wireframe objectives:

  • Visualize role-based dashboards for key users

  • Explore entitlement search, filters, and Smart Account selection

  • Show how alert triage and metrics might appear

What We Kept

  • Search and filtering validated strongly in early testing. While global search rollout was phased, scoped search remained essential across modules.

  • Embedded alerts with hover actions proved effective in helping users address support and renewal issues immediately.

  • Role-based dashboards provided targeted, task-relevant summaries for contract specialists, solutions engineers, and account executives.

What We Removed or Simplified

  • Over-customization features like full drag-and-drop layouts caused more confusion than benefit and were de-scoped.

  • Dashboard link manager tested poorly; we prioritized improving primary navigation instead.

UX Solution Highlights

My Cisco Entitlements (MCE) consolidates key entitlement information, including services, subscriptions, licenses, and devices, into a single view.

The platform delivers:

  • Real-time insights into usage, coverage, and license activation

  • A simplified way to manage user access and account structures

  • The ability to search, filter, and export large datasets for analysis

  • Role-based views aligned with Smart Account permissions

The Orders screen wasn’t just another data table—it became a critical component for Contract Specialists, who needed to:

  • Validate that what a customer purchased matched what’s shown in Cisco’s systems

  • Identify purchase timing to inform renewal discussions

  • Reference Bill To / Sold To details when reconciling invoice or entitlement mismatches

Clicking an order opens a detailed overview. Users can see line-item breakdowns and navigate to the History tab to trace fulfillment and entitlement events.

The Devices screen in My Cisco Entitlements provides users with a centralized view of all devices associated with their Smart Account. It helps users verify hardware coverage, take action on license assignments, and stay ahead of potential support issues.

Relevance by Role:

  • Solutions Engineers check coverage before initiating a support case

  • Contract Specialists confirm that devices are tied to valid contracts

  • Account Executives reference high-level device summaries for client updates

Hover-based alerts on each row allow users to jump directly to the related alert for deeper context or action.

Impact

The redesign laid the groundwork for long-term transformation. Early improvements reduced support requests related to entitlement visibility and simplified the experience for thousands of global users.

  • Delivered annotated wireframes and interaction flows

  • Created a shared design language across entitlement tools

  • Aligned internal Cisco teams and partners to a unified roadmap

  • Reduced reliance on manual processes and support escalations

Real-World Validation

The unified platform entered the pilot stage after I delivered the MVP and has been tested by over 400 customers. Feedback from beta users has been overwhelmingly positive. Users praised:

  • The one-view dashboard with consolidated data

  • Ability to sort and filter quickly

  • Visibility into critical data like Last Day of Support and service coverage