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Martin Hardee

Director, Cisco.com

Cisco.com

Martin Hardee is Director for Cisco.com, and spends his days and nights thinking about how to create great and useful experiences across the Cisco.com sites. Martin works closely with the talented design professionals across Cisco.

Before Cisco, Martin spent many years leading web experience design at Sun Microsystems where where he was active from the early days of web usability with usability guru Jakob Nielsen, grew the company's popular Java sites, and was then User Experience Director for Sun's many external web properties.

In his spare time, Martin rollerblades, spends time with his family, goes to a lot of live music and maintains DesignComics.org.

Articles

November 17, 2015

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL

Designing a New Home Page: How Hard Could This Be?

10 min read

There’s a myth that home pages no longer matter. Here’s the thinking: Most companies and organizations find their digital traffic is now fragmented by their mobile apps, their social presence, and, of course, among hundreds of lower level “side door” pages that visitors find easily via search engines. Why bother with the home page when people are interacting digitally via all […]

November 14, 2015

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL

Cool scrolling web designs in PowerPoint

1 min read

Yes, I just used “cool” and “PowerPoint” in the same sentence.  In this case I think that’s justified because of a very simple trick you can do to show off long scrolling designs (like most web and mobile pages are today) in corporate PowerPoint (or Keynote, etc) presentations. A challenge we digital design teams face is that PowerPoint and presentation […]

November 11, 2015

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL

Some Solutions Pages

1 min read

I thought I’d point out some new page designs on Cisco.com that should make it easier to find and understand information about solutions from Cisco. First, there’s the new main Solutions page, which is a one-stop starting point: (Note that we’re trying out different versions of this page, so the version you see may differ […]

November 1, 2015

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL

7 Simple Best Practices for Digital A/B Tests

2 min read

You might know that many companies run "tests" in their web and mobile experiences, where they'll pit one design, layout, or content set against another. It's a way to see...

October 28, 2015

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL

Cisco.com phasing out support of some old browsers

1 min read

All good things come to an end, and on Cisco.com we’re planning to retire our active support of some old desktop browsers in the new year. Specifically, we’ll be stopping active support of Internet Explorer versions 8 and 9.  These browsers almost qualify and Internet antiques, having been launched in 2009 and 2011 respectively. They […]

July 31, 2015

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL

Which Business Wireless Product is Right For You?

1 min read

There’s a simple new Wireless Products Selector on Cisco.com that we hope will make it quicker to choose the right wireless product for you. It’s right at the top of our Wireless products page: This leads to a very simple, intuitive tool that guides you to choosing the right wireless access point or wireless LAN controller: Feel free […]

Some tuning on Cisco.com search

1 min read

We’ve done some fine-tuning on the search on Cisco.com: It should feel faster, especially after the first search you do Results should be even more relevant Popular features like the “information box” for key queries remain intact Let us know how it’s working for you!  

June 17, 2015

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL

Cisco.com: Did you notice?

1 min read

If you’re an astute visitor to Cisco.com, you’ll notice a couple of our prominent pages have gotten some nice functional updates. . First, the all new Support & Downloads page, which went just through some tweaks, streamlining, and a mobile-friendly update: Some new functions on the new Support & Downloads page: Quicker searches for downloads […]

Yes, a New Cisco.com Home Page

3 min read

We’ve updated the design of the Cisco.com home page. Not just because we wanted to, but for you. Here’s a point by point overview, starting with the desktop/laptop version: Same top of page navigation. We’ve keep the same top of page categories, and “mega menu” navigation, as these work very well today. (Yes, we’ll continue […]