Product innovation is at the heart of everything we do. Samsung Networks has been recognized for its excellence in design for its 5G products and user experience (UX), winning five iF DESIGN AWARDS in 2022. The iF DESIGN AWARD is one of the most prestigious and renowned design awards in the world.

Following the first part of the blog highlighting Samsung’s outstanding 5G product design, this second part of the series will explore Samsung’s design excellence in software solutions, including Networks UX Design System, CognitiV Analystics and CognitiV SCO.

Networks UX Design System is a comprehensive UX “umbrella” to all the network management software provided by Samsung. It houses various UX strategies aligned with 5G technology trends and flexible design options to quickly respond to market and customer demands. This design system leads service innovation with differentiated user experience strategies to support evolving network technologies such as AI, automation, and virtualization, and the resulting changes in the service environment.

In order to respond quickly to the dynamic changes in the service environment and to support business agility, our Networks UX Design System follows the below three principles:

• A well-organized UX system that can address the complexity and functional fragmentation in network operations management (helps with UX consistency)
• A flexible UX system that responds quickly and flexibly to new service requirements
• An agile UX system that supports automation in network operation

What we offer to meet the above three principles

Networks UX Design System—an UX design platform optimized for building 5G network management, operation and analysis tools—provides UI patterns and component guidelines, case studies as well as standardized screen templates.

We are able to optimize the quality and standardize the process of our product UX design through this overarching design platform, ensuring consistency and stable product usability. Samsung’s Networks UX Design System delivers various features to simplify the UI/UX designing process.

• UI Pattern Guide - Provides detailed UI guidelines for common functions or special features among Samsung product UIs. By ensuring consistency in the UI, users are able to easily recognize repetitive functions and predict the next activity.
• UI Component Guide - Prevents UI fragmentation and helps with repetitive actions by clearly defining the use, hierarchy and behavior of the components
  
• Design Templates - Provides the most frequently used UI layout templates to facilitate the UI design/development process.

Advantages of the Networks UX Design System

UI pattern guide for AI-based functions design

While AI has become a significant part of network operations and management, our UI patterns are designed to best deliver the benefits of AI to the end-users. Our network management system includes UI patterns that minimize user intervention such as automatically populating the empty fields or reducing the number of unnecessary clicks. For example, previously, if an alarm had occurred, the operator had to go through multiple steps to clear the alarm. Now, we provide an UI to allow users to automate actions according to the alarm status, enabling the network operator to spend more time on more important tasks and to minimize human errors.

Customized viewer UX for efficient resource operation

Networks UX Design System's various customized viewer UXs increase efficiencies for services in the Cloud and EMS product line. It displays all the resources managed by the app in topology form or provides a distribution map from various angles depending on the status of the alarm of each equipment. All viewers provide a simple overview of resource hierarchies, relationships and more, and determine top-priority actions. Users can also check critical information on the screen and easily fix any errors. This real-time resource monitoring can help operators reduce maintenance costs.

Our design philosophy and innovative spirit have helped us earn such honorable recognition at iF DESIGN AWARDS 2022. We highly value our user experience and our goal is to onboard our users to user-friendly network management platforms, leveraging our cutting-edge designs. To best adapt to the fast technology evolution, we continue to consider the long-term value of our user experience and to enhance the quality of user experience through careful verification and validation processes.

Samsung CognitiV Analytics (NMT) won IDEA 2021 and iF Design Award 2022, one of the world’s most prestigious design awards.

Network management and operation require precise assessment of errors and thorough analysis of abnormal activities. Samsung’s AI-based analytics solution offers an enhanced UX design, which enables users to proactively interact with the system to learn and fix abnormalities with more accuracy. It creates an impactful and scalable AI development lifecycle, where AI learns from the past and builds experiential knowledge, while, in turn, users are able to take advantage of the enhanced AI-based functions.

Establishing the human-AI collaboration process for automated 5G network analysis and recommendation

Visualization is an important aspect of AI-based analytics tools. Samsung’s tool provides various visualization aspects, making it easier for users to identify errors and solve problems. CognitiV Analytics solution leverages human-AI collaboration, which actively compliments each other and augments the overall process, making it easier for users to view and explore AI-based analysis in one place with detailed and transparent information about response measures.

Automated analysis of abnormal data and recommendation

The AI conducts an automated analysis of signals generated by abnormal data, visualizes the analyzed information and makes recommendations accordingly. In this process, key colors can be assigned to ensure clear categorization and for better data visualization. This, in turn, allows mobile operators to quickly detect anomalies and take the right actions, enabling proactive responses to technical errors or potential problems.

Customizable dashboard card

The results of the AI-based data analysis are displayed in card formats. Users can dynamically view the results by utilizing the various settings and filters as well as the real-time layout modification functions. Users can easily customize the control environment to navigate through the tool and to analyze problems more quickly.

In-depth, interactive analysis

Samsung CognitiV Analytics also provides a “drill-down” functionality, which enables users to select informative signals from the data charts and to gain more detailed insights. Users can return to previous chart analysis at any point and “drill-down” to the problem until the user is able to identify the necessary information. User activities in each step will augment AI analytics.

Samsung CognitiV SCO helps users to monitor extensive and complex network elements by offering a diverse range of multi-view, monitoring options. It also offers UX designs specifically optimized for the management of virtualized, large-scaled networks. Users can experience a more powerful and flexible network operation environment with its optimized UX such as customizable card-based Mosaic Viewer and the Topology Viewer.

The Mosaic Viewer, which offers various view display options, is a new type of dashboard where users can check the overall data and update information of the virtualized network in real time. In Tiled Card Mode, users can focus on specific information per each type and in Dot Mode, users can view vast amount of data on one screen. This Mosaic Viewer offers a diverse monitoring experience, adjustable for various operating environments.

Topology Viewer helps you quickly search and navigate through the complex virtualized network architecture. Users can access specific information for each equipment through a visual overview optimized for the connection and interrelationship of the network elements. With icons, alarm color features and micro-interactions, users can easily identify the errors and make accurate decisions to mitigate problems.

CognitiV SCO, in particular, offers specially designed UIs to reduce human errors that occur frequently during complex virtualized network operations. The setting functions are divided into simple steps, including a friendly onboarding UI that will guide users until the task is completed, such as the Stepper UI and Page Navigation Bar. With CognitiV SCO, users can reduce errors and set up a network more quickly and accurately.

Overall, Samsung CognitiV SCO helps in simplifying the operation and management of virtualized networks, with various UX capabilities.

With outstanding UX design, this solution has been recognized by IDEA 2021 and iF DESIGN AWARDS 2022, as well as the Good Design Award 2021.