The other day I was mentioning the importance of using page grids even in the modern world of Web 2.0 (3.0? 4.0?)It turns out there’s a neat site that is dedicated completely to page grids and the web. Read More »

It’s interesting to see something from the inner depths of the user-centered design world suddenly exploding into the mass media. This has happened recently with personas.

Personas are a tool we use at Cisco in designing products and web sites — a way of profiling a “prototypical” user (that might be you!) based on our interviews and research.

For instance, one of our personas (at right) is named “Millie” and she’s a small business owner who juggles appointments, phones, deals, and employee assignments. Sometimes we use real photos; sometimes we use figurines or illustrated comic figures to represent our personas. But they’re always accompanied by a lot of background information to help us understand different types of visitors to our web sites. And they are always based on what we learn from visits or interviews with real customers.This last week I’ve seen in-your-face instances of personas used in mass media, and I think it’s an indication that companies (and even ad agencies) are becoming more oriented to their users. Read More »

Sometimes I think some of our web pages look, well, lopsided. Not everything, mind you. Not our nicely laid out home page or our wonderfully appointed news pages, of course. But look at some pages and you wonder if everything is lined up quite right.And other sites, too: This is a problem which many, many famous web sites display, and it’s all on account of something called page grids. Read More »

Coinciding with the launch of our Consumer Experience blog, and the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, we’ve also updated the consumer area of Cisco.com so that it better showcases the “Visual Networking Experience. ” Read More »

Looking at this nifty online greeting from the WebEx team got me to thinking. Read More »

Here is an interesting article about Cisco’s continuing work to improve the experience of our products and profiling colleague Cordell Ratzlaff.

Just for you, we have a sneak preview of a new search we’re implementing on Cisco.com.We think you’ll like it, and here’s why. Read More »

Hey Mom, I’m in a fancy online design magazine this month! Here’s me, with my fiends’ son Michael, who is donning an RSS costume.But the more interesting thing about the article is how the RSS “fan” has become recognizable enough now that sites are doing stylized variations on it. Read More »

You know those gazillions of little icons you see everywhere that link to social bookmarking and sharing sites? Like this? Read More »

There’s a big controversy on the web these days, with Privacy advocates fighting with Facebook: http://civ.moveon.org/facebookprivacy/Facebook, currently the most-talked-about Social Networking site on the web, is using member data in ads that appear on their site to drive business for their advertisers. Read More »

We’ve introduced a neat new feature on some sections of Cisco.com that we hope makes it easy to discover relevant related information as you’re browsing. Here’s how it works. Read More »

One of my pet peeves on product areas of web sites is how the videos leave you hanging. That is, you’ve watched an interesting video about a subject (and some of them are actually pretty interesting)… but then, what next?The person in the video may recite a URL, and a URL may even appear on the screen… but how do you get there quickly for more information?On Cisco.com, we recently introduced a way to follow on to the next step on videos. Read More »

We’ve just launched a handy (beta) tool on Cisco.com to help you find the right router, switch, wireless, or security-related product, and we’d like your feedback.This new beta Product Adviser allows you to specify a few parameters about the product (for instance, for routers: environment, LAN port density, and features) and then quickly shows a matching list of products and lets you compare them in an easy-to-read online table. Read More »

We’ve just launched Cisco’s first SMS services — short alerts available to be sent to your mobile phone. Read More »

It is interesting to see the Los Angeles Fire Department using the mobile service Twitter to report minute by minute updates on the Southern California USA fires.And, KCBS TV doing the same.