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.
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.
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’
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:
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.
You may have noticed updates in various areas of Cisco.com over the last few months. For instance, the new Cloud area, or the updates to our support menus and navigation. Even though in our team we normally work all electronically, we decided to keep a running set of improvements, components and templates on one of our walls. It’s nice to see all of the red “Delivered” labels!
We’ll be writing about some of the specifics here in coming weeks.
We have the freedom to choose most of the products and tools we use everyday, but not all of them. Some tools are required by our jobs such as the company website. And some tools provide exclusive capabilities, like my bank’s website.
For those products and services that we choose over others, measuring success is more or less binary-- we choose it or we choose something else. The providers of consumer wares can look at sales or, even more directly, adoption / consumption rate as an indicator of success.
However, there are websites and services that have no competition — the users of which are a captive audience. In these cases, there is only one option for customers. Usage is non-negotiable, so adoption or consumption is not an indicator of preference or success.
So, how does the owner evaluate the efficacy of the tool?
We think the answer is by measuring ease of use. That leads to questions like: Are users able to complete tasks? Are there errors or mistakes along the way? How long does it take to complete a task?
These questions yield some metrics, like “45% of users completed the task” and “it took 5min 30sec for most users to complete the task.” But is that good or is that bad? It is not possible to perform a comparative study when there is no competition.
In these cases, the tool’s performance must be measured against itself, over time. That requires first, conducting a baseline study, then making adjustments (hypothetically improvements), and re-testing.
This is exactly how we evaluate our support website, which is a must-have tool for many of our customers and partners.
For instance, we monitor the ability for users to complete a software download and how long it takes for most people to complete the download process — from start to finish.
Recent updates to the support site have improved the task-completion rate and dramatically reduced the time
that it takes for most users to complete the process. In fact, these improvements probably go hand-in-hand: task-completion is more frequent when the user can complete the task in less time. And, by reducing the time it takes to complete a task, we have also reduced the opportunity for errors.
These improvements stem from a number of changes including reduction in steps, short-cuts for popular downloads and a variety of other subtle changes. The cumulative effect is very positive for our customers and partners who now derive value out of their products faster than before.
A curse of any project is that moment when you look at the objectives to be solved, and realise that the rules or resources seem too constrained for success.
But sometimes, those constraints — which are so vexing early on — can be a blessing in the end. A case in point is the new Series and Model pages we’ve recently updated on Cisco.com. Originally, we had all kinds of grand ideas for how these pages should be transformed. But then we looked at the underlying systems that create the pages, and realised the grand ideas would be expensive to implement and time-consuming to maintain.
So, we dropped back. We asked ourselves: “What is it we’re really trying to accomplish for customers with this update?” Some of the answers were very simple:
Make the most important information quickly available (by putting it at the top of the pages)
Highlight product comparisons, where they’re available
Make the pages easier to scan visually
Make the fonts bigger so things are easy to read
Make basic spec information quicker to read
We realised we could do all of those things without an expensive rewrite of the underlying system. So, instead of a massive engineering project, we focused instead on new content standards and some CSS tune-up work.
You can see the result of items 1 and 2 and some of 3 above on all 7,000+ series and model pages. And, we’re beginning to roll out updates that address items 3-5 (making things easier to scan and read). Here’s an example from the Cisco Catalyst 2960 Switch series:
The simple changes we made with links to comparisons, embbeding spec tables, using bigger fonts and creating streamlined layouts were focused on things we knew customers needed in their daily use of the pages. Constraints in the underlying system, it turned out, were a blessing because the constraints made us focus on those few things.
You can see additional examples of the updated layouts on these pages:
The axiom, “The road to achievement runs through hardship” is well preserved in quotes such as these:
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” -- Albert Einstein
“I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -- Thomas Edison
“A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.” -- Elbert Hubbard
“No pain, no gain.” -- Unknown (References back to Sophocles, 5th Century B.C.)
A recent New York Times Magazine article, titled “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?”, connects this principle to the current challenges that educators face today as they prepare and evaluate high school students for college.
The author suggests a new set of criteria — ‘character’ attributes such as “grit” and “self-control” — will more accurately predict whether a student will be successful than the traditional academic tests. Students, he asserts, need to face real challenges in order to learn how to overcome challenges. Thus, success is linked to failure: students who have experienced failure, and have learned from that experience, may be better equipped to succeed later in life.
We follow similar principles to make design improvements to the support web site.
For instance, we follow an iterative approach when we develop new capabilities and introduce design changes. A successful design is derived from numerous unsuccessful designs that are progressively improved as a result of iterative adjustments, highlighted by repetitive testing. In other words, we try something, take note of the results, make adjustments, and try again. This is repeated until the results are acceptable.
There’s a great quote in design circles that goes something like this: “Your site will be tested; you get to decide when.”
The point is, we can test a new design with a small, representative set of users before launch or let it be tested by a mass audience post launch. If we test before launch, the failure is private, the stakes are low, and the learning can be applied. If we release new capabilities on our website without testing, our customers are the guinea pigs, and the test is on the big stage with the spotlight shining. The stakes are higher.
Thankfully that’s not the way aircraft, medical systems, and other tools are designed, and it’s not the way we design the support site.
Our typical tests are focused on task success. Users perform a number of tasks on the new design and we evaluate the performance based on 1) ability to complete the task successfully and 2) how long it takes to complete the task. Through a succession of tests and subsequent adjustments to the design, we are able to improve and refine the design.
There are other observations made during the testing that are useful to the design team. However, task completion and time-on-task are the key measures that ultimately provide a numeric score for the task. The score provides a way to compare tasks to each other and track the task success over time.
We recently conducted a site-wide benchmark study for the support site and the results were encouraging. Our benchmark studies are conducted at regular intervals and cover a broad collection of tasks that are considered most essential capabilities of the site. The most recent study indicated that overall task completion for the Support site had improved about 15% since 2009.
It is gratifying to see the improvements and receive the positive reinforcement from the test scores. But the most recent test also reminds us of areas that still need to improve.
So, it’s back to the drawing board and the user testing lab. Time to put forth some new ideas and start failing again and again. We go through this because we know failure leads to success — as long as we are learning from each attempt.
“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” - Thomas Edison
You may notice this weekend that we’re doing some updates to the product series and model pages on Cisco.com. These are simple and subtle changes, but we think they’ll make it easier and quicker to get to the information you need.
I’ll write more later, but here’s a preview and a quick overview:
1 -- Pictures enlarge more gracefully, but still open in a separate box so you can keep browsing around. 2 -- Most important links now featured at the top of the page, for easy access. 3 -- Comparisons and other key features made more obvious. 4 -- Facebook Like and other features in a new standard location 5 -- Streamlined Let Us Help and Contact information, which also routes to different places depending on the product and your role. 6 -- All the key support you rely on.
Enjoy — and if you have additional suggestions or notice anything is amiss, send us a note via the “Feedback” link that’s at the bottom of every Cisco.com page.
My friend and colleague Helen Lechner has a saying when someone excitedly comes to her with a grandiose idea to solve a simple problem on our web or mobile sites. It goes something like “I know you want a Ferrari, but maybe for this project you really just need a little red wagon.”
Actually, she’s said this to me more than a few times. I often think of that quote when I myself get excited about something big or grandiose; it reminds me to step back and ask if what our Customers and Partners may need is something more simple and straightforward, like a clear datasheet; a well-written service description; or a clear conceptual diagram. Sometimes you do indeed need a Ferrari to get places. But sometimes a little red wagon is fine — and in fact preferred.
Our design team was recently inspired to make Helen a “fake home page” poster to commemorate her saying.
Enjoy, and here’s hoping that you and your team drive both Ferraris and little red wagons, as appropriate.
I have written in the past about the value of using storytelling in web and mobile design, and specifically, using design comics to illustrate or work through user experience (UX) problems and solutions. Design comics are really just storyboards of an experience, but with characters and dialogs added so as to tell a story.
The great things about using comic storyboards in illustrating an experience are that (1) they help you think through a new experience in parallel to the use cases you’ve developed, (2) they include the user, not just the web pages or interface, (3) they get everyone on the same page about what’s getting built, and (4) they’re quick to create.
Here’s an example of a comic set we whipped together a while back to illustrate the potential experience with registering for a new WebEx iPhone app.
Our WebEx team was launching the first version of our iPhone app under a tight deadline for Mac World. Though the app itself was free and downloadable off the iTunes app store, many people would not actually have a WebEx account to use it. The team first started out by showing the story of how a user might learn of the new app, and what the default experience would be if based on the status quo registration. First, here’s a panoramic view of the one-page comic we put together:
And some more readable close-ups:
Part 1:
Part 2:
You can see her frown when she encountered the long form, and this simple illustration did a lot to show the issues that users would encounter if we simply translated our traditional long forms onto a mobile device. In fact, since that time we’ve done a lot of work on the web sign-up forms also.
This little comic did a lot to illustrate some inherent problems with simply translating a web page experience to mobile. Once the team made those issues visible through the comic, it was obvious to the team what to do: Streamline the experience and dramatically simplify the forms. Thanks to that comic, we removed a huge barrier to initial for the app, which (thanks to being a great app but also having a low sign-up barrier) is now amazingly successful.
You can quickly do comics using PowerPoint slides and some quick sketching, as shown in this video I put together:
The same research that led to the new mega-menu also led to changes on the support home page. Today, you can get a sneak preview of the new home page as we prepare for it’s official release.
In the coming days, we’ll share some of the thinking that led to the many changes on the support home page. In the meantime, while all of our users are tabula rasa, we invite you to check it out and then tell us what you think.
As you’ll remember from Bill Skeet’s post the other day, we recently rolled out a new menu for Support that focuses on the top tasks our customers do on Cisco.com. This menu is available on virtually every page — it’s that little window that appears when you hover your cursor over the “Support” menu link.
My favorite quote in the article hints nicely at the balance we try to achieve on Cisco.com:
“Support is a different animal than marketing. It is truly task-based. More access is key—the quicker the better. That requires functionality, scannability, and a nod towards popularity. This is where Cisco.com gets it—and the gold.”
Congrats to the Support web team for this very nice (and on target) review.
