“Crowd sourcing” — the idea that the greatest ideas come from amongst creative throngs of experts — has certainly come into its own. Companies have been at it several years now, and at Cisco we certainly have several of our own examples range from the I-Prize program to the interesting Heaven or Hell contest where consumers described their ideal (or nightmare) home technology dream.
But two crowd-sourcing examples last week grabbed my attention anew, because each had an unique twist and was accelerated by real-time factors.
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A while back, I blogged about a new embedded search feature we were thinking about building into the Cisco.com site. It is a simple search plug-in that works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and some other browsers..
The way it works is that you can add it to you browser (from pretty much any place on Cisco.com) and then use the search plug-in built into your browser to search Cisco.com.
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Here’s something worth visiting. From the “Quick Links” pulldown on the Cisco.com home page, you can find Cisco’s Communities page, which features some of our more prominent online groups and communities. Read More »
Not that you would ever watch cartoons at work, but I was noticing that TBS.com has a “boss button” on its site, just like on PC video games. Read More »
In days of yore, if you visited any design shop, you’d see scores of printouts, sketches, and other design work tacked and taped on walls throughout. In fact, in our design teams at Cisco we still do a lot of this today to inspire each other and share ideas. And, Web design teams use this same technique to capture inspiration that they may have seen on other great Web sites. But what happens when you really want to share an idea, and folks are located around the globe rather than down the hall or in the cube next door? There’s a pretty easy electronic way to do the same thing, and we’ve been using it for a while to share screen shots of inspiring things on the Web. Read More »
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The other day I was blogging about how ready-made off-the-shelf templates can be just the ticket if you have a small business and need to update your web presence.
But what if you’re in a much bigger company, and you need to create templates that work specifically for your products and brand, and can scale to all of the countries where you have an online presence?
I realized something that will sound absolutely shocking:
At Cisco, we run our web sites on templates. It’s the only sane way to keep on top of a web presence that encompasses literally millions of pages. Beyond sanity, templates also save time and money. For instance, we use the template below for some of our seminars and events around the world, and our tech team says it has saved them two days per event setup because everything is ready-made:Read More »
Recently, for Cisco Live!, we put together a breezy and informal overview of some of the improvements we’ve been making to Cisco.com. There are a couple of nifty “hidden secrets” featured on this video, so it’s worth a look:(Note that a couple of features we labeled as “Coming Soon” have already gone live in the few weeks since we recorded this for Cisco Live!) Read More »
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A friend of mine was making a point the other day about the difference between art and design.Paraphrased, it goes something like this:
Art is when you make something interesting, touching, inspiring or beautiful.
Design, on the other hand, is about solving problems. Design can also be inspiring or even beautiful. But the primary job of design is to make things work. (That’s why it worries me a bit when I hear people say “we’re going to design a better user experience” and then proceed to talk solely about icons and graphics, which are often more art than design.)
Here is a case in point. I like to think our new Voice and Unified Computing pageis nice example of solid design. That is, it solves real problems and addresses real needs of customers. And, there’s beauty and inspiration thrown in for good measure, making it artful as well. Read More »
Early July, we released a new version of the support web site to make the support experience much more personalized. Additionally, we introduced a troubleshooting dashboard where it gathers ALL relevant information and presents them in a single location with an easy to use interface.
Remember the various posts I’ve written about the value of remote online usability sessions? I wanted to take a moment to thank all of our customers and partners for participating in the many remote usability tests we’ve done over the past year. Their participation in these tests of the new features on our site really helps us perfect what we’re doing on Cisco.com, and improves the experience for everyone.And now we have a way for even more folks to help us improve Cisco.com: You can now sign up to participate in future online usability sessions (right from home or work) and get an early preview of new features we are building for the site. Most sessions are short (15 minutes or less), and we also have some longer online and in-person tests.A bonus is that many of the opportunities are paid or involve a thank you gift, so you get something extra in exchange for the few minutes of time you take with us. And, you’ll be making Cisco.com a better place every time. Read More »
I had to share this amusing photo from a Cisco TelePresence meeting we had with one of our design agencies on Friday…Janet, from our Cisco.com design team, was in California. Dan, with the agency, was in Virginia 2,400 miles away. Read More »
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Not a week goes by that I don’t get asked by someone about good books or courses about how to improve the user experience for products and web sites. It turns out that User Experience Designer Whitney Hess gets the same requests, and has put together a handy list of books, courses and other resources to get you started on the road to providing a better experience to your customers and visitors. Read More »
The other day we posted an entry about how tricky it is to convey sophisticated ideas in a simple way (and the approach we have taken on some Cisco Eos Flash experiences along these lines).Nobody was better at explaining things quickly than TV pitchman Billy Mays, who, sadly, was found dead today at his Florida home. Though Mays worked in a completely different world from high technology, his little commercial gems showed how a sometimes complicated story could be boiled down to setting up a premise, giving a little technical background, and demonstrating how the product works. I often use examples of his work when describing to people how to get across a point quickly online.Don’t expect to see infomercials anything like these on Cisco.com (and I promise we will never yell like Billy), but we have been thinking a lot about how to make our online demos and Flash experiences more straightforward (like that Cisco Eos example mentioned above). There are elements of that Bill Mays spirit that we will hope inspires us to be succinct storytellers.Here are a couple of my favorite Billy Mays ads: Some spoofs he did for ESPN that show off the master’s style of demonstration and storytelling: Read More »
Janet, from our Cisco.com design team, was in California. Dan, with the agency, was in Virginia 2,400 miles away.