The Cisco.com Support site received some good news in the past week.

On May 7, Cisco was honored – for the ninth time – by the prestigious “Ten Best Support Sites” award from the Association of Support Professionals (ASP).

On May 9, Cisco was awarded the 2012 Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) STAR Award for “Best Online Support” for the fourth year in a row.

An industry-leading support website is the perfect complement for Cisco’s world class products. These distinctions validate the value inherent in Cisco.com support for our customers and partners.

We’re proud that the Cisco Support Website continues to distinguish us in the industry, and remains the resource that 3 million unique monthly visitors rely on to resolve technical issues without engaging an engineer.

But we’re not satisfied.

More improvements are underway to simplify and personalize our online support experience. Starting this weekend, the support site is introducing new capabilities on the support home page for customer and partners to accelerate repetitive tasks such as downloading software, viewing the status of support cases and visiting product support pages.

Check out the updated Support Home Page today and let us know what you think!

The Cisco.com support site is evaluated every day by each user who uses the site. It is also tested through more prescriptive methods, such as third-party evaluations, audits and diagnostic tests. The feedback from all of these is used to gauge how we’re doing and where we should focus our efforts in the future.

These diverse sources of feedback are critical to a well rounded and complete understanding of the web site’s performance.

In the past year, the support site has been recognized by organizations that perform independent evaluations of web sites as a source of best practices. Some of these are professional organizations and carry significant weight in the industry. Others are independent groups that have developed methodologies to evaluate and score web sites and publish their results as a resource. In both cases, we are grateful to have been called out as a leader among peer companies.

The support site is also evaluated by organizations that track product quality. These groups often send auditors who investigate probe the processes that are used in creating, managing and operating the website. These evaluations are extremely thorough and ultimately are a reflection of the website, the products, the people and the company.

Finally, we subject the support site to our own testing in order to track progress.

We conduct user-cenetered research (such as usability testing) on specific features of the site as needed. These studies are variable in frequency and the questions are optimized for the specific research objectives. And we conduct ‘benchmark’ tests which have routine schedules and fixed protocols.

One of these tests is performed every six months and taps many aspects of the site to ensure the basic functions are performing properly. This diagnostic tool is “a mile wide and an inch deep” meaning it does not exercise any specific part of the site in deep rigor, but is more like a check-up to make sure the site is healthy on a macro level. Even so, we get valuable insights from the scores of each individual task and are able to compare scores with previous tests since the test is identical each time it is performed.

This is minor so you might not have even noticed it — or if you did, we hope you noticed it in a good way!

This weekend we made some subtle changes to the timing of those interactive  “Megamenus” that are available from all Cisco.com pages. We made the change because after some extensive usability testing, we found that some of the original interaction timing struck customers as too “jittery.” So, we have made the timing more purposeful.  Let us know what you think.

Tags: usability, webexperience

You may have noticed we did some updates to Cisco.com search in the last week.  Here are some highlights:

• Custom # of results. Here’s an important feature for Cisco.com power users: We’ve added the option to change the number of search results displayed from the standard 10 to your choice of 10, 20, 30 or 50 results per page:

• Status on support community items. Cisco Support Community forums content now show question status, rating, and number of replies within the search results

• Product synonyms help findability. Added product ID synonyms to Software Download and Forums, Blogs, and Wikis

• Improved Web Accessibility by implementing tab order and focus on Search Results page, including skip links
• Updated advanced search page functionality
• Additional tuning on results.

Enjoy!

Tags: cisco.com, search

Our digital team (the folks who bring you Cisco.com, mobile and presence on the online social venues like twitter, Facebook and YouTube) had another great virtual all-hands today thanks to Cisco TelePresence. Just like last time, we had tons of people in multiple locations around the globe.  Most of us are in the Northern Hemisphere, where it’s spring, and so we wore rabbit ears and festive spring colors (the people who look so intent are looking at one of my amazing slides!):

Tags: digital, TelePresence, webexperience

This nice blogger, Victoria Morehead of the optimization outfit Brooks Bell) designed an A/B test on their blog for a Cisco.com page. Their suggestion was to test the effectiveness of video (“A”) vs no video (“B”) vs segmented videos: http://www.brooksbell.com/blog/2012/03/id-test-that-determining-the-conversion-power-of-video-with-a-split-test

What we know about video already:

• Visitors who view videos stay longer, go deeper into the site, and return more frequently
• People who watch a video are in fact twice as likely to return
• People who watch a video are more likely to complete a “success event” such as a chat or downloading relevant information
• We use video interaction to help personalize some elements and behavior on your site journey

The blog points out some places where a good A/B test could reveal even more good data. You can bet we’re talking about running a test like this.

Tags: retention, usability, video, webexperience

Pretty frequently now, I have been getting this question from friends: “Do I really need a company web site?” Of course, I have been hearing this musing for at least 10 years in Devil’s advocacy conversations.  But recently it has become almost a meme. I hear it mostly from people not in the heart of running digital strategy or operations, but I’ve heard it from friends at several other companies, who find running a web site complicated and expensive and wonder if they really  need their site or if they could just do it exclusively via other avenues such as Facebook pages.  The answer I usually give them is: “Yes, you do; and no, probably not.” And then I add: “But you’d better be thinking about broadening your mix and strategy.”

To back up for a moment, the argument against web sites is usually phrased as in this recent article in ReadWriteWeb, which argues that community building and content happen most effectively outside of the confines of a company web site – where it can be more easily shared and discovered. Fair point, and there’s no better example than the viral nature of YouTube discovery and YouTube sharing via Facebook, twitter and other mechanisms.

There’s strong reason to look hard at your digital mix:  Social and especially mobile footprints are growing meteorically.  Last year, smart phones exceeded PC sales, and BusinessInsider CEO Henry Blodget recently pointed out that in a few short years PC sales will be absolutely dwarfed by smart phones purchases.

At Cisco, we see similar trends.  As shown in this chart below, tablet visitors are growing at 341%, mobile visitors 91%, and social reach is at 55% growth.  annually (and all probably more in the last month, and my friends in B2C see even more meteoric mobile growth).  Whereas last year our general web site visit growth around 2-5% depending on what month range you look at.  And we’re very conservative in these numbers (for social reach, we don’t even count individuals like Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior who has 1.4 million followers on twitter today).

But look more closely. Looking at traffic size, you will see that the web is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. The core Cisco web sites get 240 million visits per year (around 72 million annual visitors), each one an opportunity to provide support, training and (yes) marketing to people who have sought us out and are engaged with Cisco. Furthermore, notice that the content on the web site draws in more than 70 million referrals from Google and other search engines. Referrals in from social media (mostly Facebook) are a much smaller number (even considering in the activity of “friends of friends.”) Even considering that visitors from social media are more engaged and register and interact more, it’s an impressive picture.

Furthermore, the web sites provide a place to interact in a long-term relationship: We can personalize your experience based on interest and behavior, can provide transactional one-stop service to, say, Partners via vehicles such as My Cisco Workspace, and (to talk marketing for a moment) can personalize offers and collect leads from new potential customers. And, the same technologies, services and processes that support these things on a web site support them on mobile devices including apps.

So, what’s the reality?  You need to ensure your strategy aggressively embraces the social and mobile worlds; and, you need a company web site, too. You need to think of your digital footprint is an ecosystem where everything works together. It would be just as ludicrous to have no social presence as it would to have no web site and decide to ignore your visitors on tablets and smart phones. That fact is, all of these digital mechanisms work together to reach and interact with your customers.

Next time: Why I hope you are planning your web, social and mobile technology strategies together.

Tags: digital, web, webexperience

Sometimes, to create a high-quality experience, a product just needs some time to simmer.

Soups, sauces, and consommé are the result of boiling down to an intensely flavorful product and technology can benefit from a similar process of distillation.

The reductive process in cooking derives a more concentrated mixture with less volume than before the boiling but with a much greater quality. With frequent stirring, the impurities are brought to the surface and removed, leaving a more concentrated, and potent, product.

We’ve done some simmering, stirring and reduction of the support site recently. Ten links were removed from every overlay on the support home page in January.

That’s a reduction of about 150 links from one of the most frequently viewed pages on Cisco.com, and yet the change went unnoticed.

The links we removed were for the top 5 documents and top 5 downloads in each product category. Our user testing suggested they might be valuable, so we added them when we launched the redesign in July.

As we monitored the site metrics, those links accounted for less than 2% of all clicks on the overlays.

So we got rid of them.

This distillation process applies to websites as well as almost any technology product. A feature-set refined to its essence can provide a richly concentrated experience.

But most products, websites and mobile apps keep adding new features, content and capabilities regardless of whether people are using them. Too many product teams either loathe or are apathetic to remove features.

Nonetheless, reductive design is becoming more critical as web tools and content migrate to mobile devices where there are more constraints and restrictions.

For example, the smaller screen-size forces designers to make some tough choices.

CNET has an article about the latest release of Bump Technologies’ Bump app that talks about how the team actually removed functionality that wasn’t adding value and simplified and focused the app. This definitely runs counter to the routine “add more features in every release” approach, so prevalent in software industry.

It’s a great example of monitoring app usage metrics and changing the app based on what users are actually doing.

Like any ingredient, a new feature can seem like a good idea in isolation. However, when added to a delicately complex stew of other features and content, it can get lost in the mix, or dilute or otherwise weaken the balance of the concoction.

In this regard, designers are a bit like a chef who knows that too much of anything can be just as damaging as too little.

Cisco.com was just once again rated in the upper stratosphere of global web sites – just behind Google and Facebook. In the respected ByteLevel Research Web Globalization Score Card for 2012, Cisco.com grabs a very nice #3 ranking among 250 web sites for global corporations.  Cisco has consistently held this #3 position overall since 2007.

Also exciting for our global team, Cisco is specifically called out as a regular of the top globalization list: “Companies like Cisco, 3M, and Samsung have become regular faces in the top 10.”

It takes an incredible amount of energy to design and regularly update our major 85 regional sites, and our Cisco.com Global Team works literally around the clock to keep things humming  (I know that for sure because I am always invited to attend their midnight and 6 AM meetings!)

You can read a little more about the 2011 Web Globalization Score Card at ByteLevel Research’s web site.

Tags: global, globalization, webexperience

Web analysts SiteIQ have just ranked Cisco.com among business IT sites, tying with our friends at IBM.com, and beating out 22 other sites for the honors.
SiteIQ noticed the many subtle improvements we’ve been making across the site in the last year: “[There] is hardly a space on this site that one can’t notice a single, although quiet, improvement. This relentless march towards optimal usability is exactly what gained Cisco.com its first place ranking—and made IBM.com share the spotlight.”

I know there’s a lot still to do to make Cisco.com into the best in the world, but nice mentions like this certainly boost our resolving to keep driving to that end.

See the SiteIQ blog for more on their rankings.

Tags: cisco.com, user experience, web experience

A few weeks ago, the Support Mega Menu was updated on our 6 international support websites and 18 Latin American websites. This update brought the design and organization of the US Support Mega Menu that has proven to be extremely well utilized by our users since it was introduced last May.

The Support Mega Menu provides quick access to some key support destinations including links to the most popular product categories, links to popular downloads, and links to contact Cisco technical support and to open a support case. It also allows the user to search for product information or downloads directly, with more robust search capabilities. These benefits are now available to our global audience.

Below is an example of the support mega menu on the Japanese site:

These updates required a great deal of cooperation across functions within Cisco including our Services, Marketing, IT, and global TAC teams.

Domo arigato!

We made some updates to the search experience on Cisco.com recently.

1. Created US Product/Part ID (PID) synonyms – Makes it much easier to find products by Product/Part ID by  suggesting queries related to that PID.  By the way, you guys do a lot of PID searches — this helps make them much better.

Example: Enter PID ‘10000-1p2-1ac’ and search will provide you the option of “You could also try this related product: “cisco 10008 router”

2. US spell checking – Improves your experience by suggesting other queries if the system detects a misspelling.

Example: Enter a misspelled keyword ‘routr’ and search will provide you a “Did you mean:” optional keyword ‘router’

3. Clickable synonyms – Improves your experience by suggesting other similar queries without automatically including them in the search results.

Example: Enter keyword ‘cisco acl’ and have clickable synonym options presented for alternate search results

4. Verb lemmatization – Wait, what?  Oh, that’s the thing that provides results for variations of a word (install, installing, installed).

Example: Enter the term ‘install’ and search will also return results for ‘installing’ and ‘installed’

Enjoy!

Tags: cisco.com, search, usability, webexperience

How do you have an effective meeting of  100 people who are distributed around the globe?  And have some seasonal fun at the same time?

The answer is Cisco TelePresence!  Last week our global digital team — the folks who manage Cisco.com, mobile web and online social media — met for an end of year all hands. We had 14 TelePresence rooms situated globally. And in addition to some really productive planning, brainstorming and communication, the teams had a moment or two of fun, as evidenced by this “Reindeer Brigade” from one of our San Jose, California teams:

Tags: collaboration, TelePresence

Have you ever taken the scenic route when using a website? If you have, it probably wasn’t on purpose.

The concept doesn’t really apply to the web. Every click is expected to take you closer to your the goal. Getting to the destination is the only objective when traversing a web site.

Wouldn’t it be great if the paths that we take most often were a little bit shorter, a bit better marked, and a bit more direct?

On a website, that’s entirely possible.

With this in mind, we’ve started adding some mechanisms that provide shortcuts, such as popular downloads and the downloads search tool on the Support Home Page and Support Mega Menu.

Since we made some changes in March, we’ve seen some fantastic evidence about how users navigate to downloads. Before, 77% of users went through the top page of the Software Downloads Product Navigator to drill down and find the model, release and ultimately download. Now, 49% are starting on the top page, which means 51% are starting deeper in the Product Navigator structure.

In short, more people are starting closer to their destination-- it takes less time and fewer clicks to get there. As a result, the average time to select and start to download software was nearly cut in half from a year ago.

Shorter trips means the opportunity for errors is reduced. And the metrics indicate that 5-9% more users are successfully completing downloads compared to last year.

This is all due to shortcuts. The enhancements to the site allow users to either go directly to the destination, or send the user deep in the product navigator, by-passing layers of product categories and sub-categories.

There are three things that contribute to deeper entry into the product navigator: 1) the download search, 2) popular downloads links and 3) the download link on each product support page (series pages).

Download search was available before we started making changes, as was the download link on Series pages, however, both were somewhat challenging to find. The design changes elevated the search to the Support Mega Menu and the Support Home Page.

Popular downloads links on the Support Mega Menu and the Support Home Page are likely helping. But a big contributor has been the Downloads Search on the mega menu and the tab on the support home page.

Another big contributor is the advent of overlays for the product categories on the Support Home Page, which are driving more people to the Series pages.

From the Series pages, users can click the download link and land deep in the product navigator. This avoids drilling down through the product navigation. Based on our metrics, it looks like quite a few users have already found this shortcut.

This past weekend, we made a subtle change to the product navigation in the “mega menus” available from the top of the pages on Cisco.com.

Notice the change? Feedback welcome!

Tags: navigation, webexperience