I used to be the sort of fellow who eschewed design or leadership awards for web sites. I figured the true measure of success is seeing the sites used every day for Customers and Partners answering their questions, assessing the right product fits, communicating with their colleagues on forums.

I still take awards with a grain of salt, but we’ve gotten several mentions lately for Cisco.com, so I thought it would be worth a brief recap for the following reason: These awards not only reflect our team’s hard work here at Cisco, but also your participation. They show:

• How you’ve helped us achieve excellence (or strive for it, at least) with your regular participation in comments to the site and in our 1:1 usability tests that we do around the globe via WebEx.
• How our team has worked diligently to continuously improve our web, social and mobile experiences, based on your input.

Here is  a list of some of the accolades we’ve gotten lately, and then I promise I’ll stop bragging for a while:

• As Bill Skeet just blogged recently, our Online Support experience recently won the “Ten Best Support Sites” award from the Association of Support Professionals (ASP). And, Cisco was awarded the 2012 Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) STAR Award for “Best Online Support” for the fourth year in a row.
• Cisco recently won an Award of Distinction for our Brand Identity System, which includes the web site. The scope of this one included Cisco brand guidelines, along with brand assets such as Cisco.com, navigation, photography, icons, templates and more.
• Cisco.com is a 2012 Webby Honoree:  Official Honoree distinction is awarded to the top 15% of all work entered 10,000 entries received from the US  and more than 60 countries.
• And, our Cisco London 2012 website has also been selected as an Official Honoree of the 16th Annual Webby Awards in the Corporate Communications category.
• Cisco won a bronze ADDY in the AAF-Silicon Valley ADDY Competition. This award is for our new Brand Identity System which includes all of the standards for the web, mobile and social venues. The ADDYs are arguably the world’s largest creative competition, with over 60,000 entries each year nationwide.
• Cisco’s Connected Life Exchange blog was honored at @btobmagazine Social Media Marketing Awards. In the article, the writer says “The whole package is refreshingly non-promotional and often fascinating. Cisco continues to innovate in the suddenly red-hot field of content marketing with an approach to thought leadership that emphasizes actual thinking.”

And, I already mentioned these, but they bear repeating because these focus on coverage and usability:

• SiteIQ #1 overall of Enterprise IT Web Sites (tied with IBM) and hands down #1 in Usability
• ByteLevel Research ranked in Top 3 in global web and mobile coverage, just behind Google and Facebook.

Our digital teams don’t think about awards that much; but we do think about you and how you use our web sites, mobile and other digital experiences every day. And I like to think that focus has translated into some of the recent accolades.

Tags: awards, usability, web design, webexperience

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

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

You could say that I’m an early-adopter of new tech gadgets. That being said, I also continue to use older devices until I find a very good reason to upgrade to something more current.

Maybe that’s why I don’t own a mobile smartphone, because I’ve previously not had a compelling reason to retire my basic feature-phone. That is, until now.

Read More »

Tags: applications, Cisco GIST, Mobile Apps, usability, use case, video communication

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