To gather the requirements, we conducted weekly meetings with 2 Cisco engineers (Jorge Taylor and Edwin Li). These meetings were typically of the form of a semi-structured interview. They gave us a document with their initial base requirements for the functionality, UI and techstack. As the project progressed, we presented our current website, and seeked feedback on how features can be improved to better align with project requirements.

This was the general format of our semi-structured interviews:

Question 1: "What are the main issues with your existing log viewer app?"
Answer 1: "The core issue with the current system is the complete lack of customisability. Our filters are limiting, and only allow us to search for specific keywords or phrases. In your product, we hope to see features that allow us to search for precise string or regex patterns. Another issue is the lack of colours in the existing tool. Everything is a single colour, and it makes it difficult to differentiate between different filters."

Question 2: "Would you like to see a dashboard with all the data displayed in a pictorial/graphical manner?"
Answer 2: "It would be nice to have, but it has already been built in the current system, and also it is not a tool that the team regularly uses. We would like more focus to be put on precise, customisable and responsive filtering rather than graphical tools."

Question 3: "What are the key UI components that you would like to see in our product?
Answer 3: We would definitely like to see a freeform text box where users can type string patterns or regex patterns. We also want a colour picker where the user can choose a colour for each filter being applied on the dataset."

Question 4: "What are your thoughts on incorporating a LLM chatbot to assist engineers with data analysis?"
Answer 4: "If you have time after completing the core requirements, adding an LLM chatbot would really help automate workflows, and speed up doing repetitive tasks like writing out long filters or regex patterns."

Question 5: "What do you think of the current website design? Are there any functionalities or design points where improvements can be made?"
Answer 5: "We like the basic layout, and since you have made the main requirements for custom filtering, we have some UI changes that we would like to see. Create 2 sections on the webpage. One section has the unfiltered logs, and the other section only contains the records that have been filtered. If you could also incorporate pagination for improved responsiveness it would be a great addition."