Yesterday, Bill Skeet posted an update on a list of improvements we’ve made to the main support experience on Cisco.com. In a related effort, we’ve also been working on some simple but important updates specifically for small business, and have just re-launched a Small Business Support and Resources page at cisco.com/go/smallbizhelp. Some features of this new page:

• Highlights the Small Business Online Chat Support option
• Phone support hyperlinks direct customers and partners to appropriate Support Center based on product
• Community support hyperlinks direct customers and partners to appropriate Support Community based on product
• Provides customers and partners with advice to expedite their support calls
• Calls out ‘how to purchase options’ for customers and unregistered partners
• Provides links to Open Source information
• Go URL shortcut (cisco.com/go/smallbizhelp) – easy for customers and partners to remember and easy to include in docs and correspondence
• Fast search ‘recommended content’ already in place for this page

Let us know how you like these updates, and enjoy!

Tags: support, usability, webexperience

Chances are you have used Wikipedia for something in the last few months. And if so, chances are you have seen one of their fundraising pleas, such as these:

What’s really interesting is that Wikipedia is publishing the results of the ads, in something we in the biz call an “A/B” or multivariate test.  The idea is this: Create a series of different ads – with different pictures, headlines, buttons and links – then alternate them across the site, and see which combinations work best. You can measure “version A”  versus “version B” (that’s called an A/B test), or you can do a more sophisticated mix and match of the elements, called a multivariate test.  The great thing is you get data from 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000+ interactions with your web site creative content, and from that can see what visitors are actually interested in, based on their behavior.

Commercial web sites do this all day every day, but the difference is that Wikipedia is posting their results in real time publicly, to the world.  There’s a ton of raw data about click behavior in multiple languages.

In their link to their A/B tests data updates you see a lot of interesting and counter-intuitive behaviors.  For instance, I thought “Admit it- without Wikipedia, you never could have finished that report.” is a fantastic headline, but it got less than a 1% click-through rate, whereas the “personal appeal from Jimmy Wales” with his picture got almost 3% clickthrough on a recent week.

The Wikipedia team are also posting regular summaries of their findings, in case you don’t want to slog through their detailed testing page or download their spreadsheets of raw data.  Some findings from last week emphasize that the total experience (from clicks through donation) are important to measure, and not just the initial click-through rate:

• “The original two-step payment form we’ve been using is the most effective, it performed better than the new one-step process.”
• “Adding an editor’s image to the landing page did not significantly affect donations.”
• “The click-through rates on the editor banners continue to be on par with the winning Jimmy banner, but bring in fewer donations.”
• “Many donors appear to relate better to letters which focus on readers showing support instead of individuals editing.”
• “There has been a positive response to the new editor banners, the variety keeps our campaign interesting.”

From the commercial web world, there are a couple of other sites that post results of A/B and multivariate tests: WhichTestWon.com and MarketingExperiments.com both show recent design tests and let you guess which ones were most effective.

By the way, you don’t have to use A/B tests just for advertising. In fact, many companies use them as part of their design regimen to test for which designs actually are most effective for users to complete a task.  The A/B test tells you which design works better, but of course not why it works better; you still need usability testing for that.

P.S. Shoutout  to the folks at digitaloptimizer and others for pointing out the Wikipedia tests to me – very interesting.

Tags: design, usability, webexperience

The folks who run our online programs for our Partners team showed me some interesting charts the other day. They show that Cisco Partners are savings lots of time using My Cisco and My Cisco Workspace.  If you don’t know, My Cisco is kind of like a central dashboard that follows you around (as a menu) on Cisco.com, and that also has a full workspace page.

My Cisco is especially popular with Partners, who can access their deals and quotes, find events, check training and certifications and check Partner news – and access all manner of information that previously was locked up in separate tools.  Instead of navigating to individual tools for each new task, Partners can go directly to My Cisco Workspace to get this information at a glance on one page.

Almost half of Partners surveyed say they are saving at least 20% of the time they used to spend with online tools – and some save as much as 50% of their time!

My Cisco also has many functions for Customers, too, including an array of support-related capabilities:

• Recent service requests
• Alerts for updates on software previously downloaded
• Products recently viewed or visited in the support area (so you can get back quickly)
• Products and devices that you own or manage (so you can see one-stop documentation, support and alert information)
• Active support notifications
• Network bookmarks available from any system you use

There’s a convenient catalog you can use to choose and customize the functions that you want to keep in your workspace and follow-along My Cisco menu.

To get to My Cisco, you can access the My Cisco menu at the bottom of most every Cisco.com page. And at the top of most pages there’s a convenient shortcut link to My Cisco Workspace.

Enjoy!

Tags: design, usability, webexperience