Web Experience Insights on the Importance of the End-User Experience

Training, Certification and Events, updated

We recently updated our entryway into Training and Events. The short description of the changes is that we focused on the following areas:

• Navigation: Expose (four)  different kinds of “wayfinding” on the home page: Role, Business Topics,  Strategies, Industries. Make the important links to Training and to Events more obvious
• Visual Design: Lay out the page to be more readable. Give the home page a more modern aesthetic.
• Simplification: Escalate important content but avoid overwhelming the page with links. Simplify the text so you can scan to the right thing more quickly.
• Organization by key audiences

Here’s the comparison.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:55AM PST

Web components, CSS and the quick change artist

One of the biggest challenges a web team can face is a project that requires a complete visual change of their large web property. It’s a tough challenge, because there are usually multiple platforms underneath, all using different templating and rendering systems. And, the expectation is always that the change happen across thousands or millions of pages in an instant, since nobody wants a site where pages in different sections look radically different.

One of tech’s big sites this week underwent such a change, which was executed very efficiently.  In the online technology world (I’m talking web sites, mobile and such), the Java technology web site is one we consult regularly, since it hosts tons of technical information about the Java programing language and platform. Members of our technical team are on the site several times a day, and, even though I am a design director now at Cisco, I periodically check it as well since I used to run that Java site back in the early days of Java.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:00AM PST

An improved routers page

A little while back we updated the design on our Routers category page pretty substantially. You probably remember the old page, which wasn’t as organized as you might have liked.  So, we implemented a new design that makes it easier to compare models, easier to scan for the right product, and we’ve organized information within tabs.  As one customer said during some recent testing of the new page:

“I really like the format of this, being able to expand and hide products. I think it is perfect actually. They have also touched on pertinent information for the products.” 

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 07:15AM PST

NY Times News in Video

Here an interesting web interface for perusing video: We’re currently running an interesting overlay on the New York Times home page which shows some of the day’s main stories in video.  To see it, click on this banner below on the US edition of the New York Times:

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 10:35PM PST

John Chambers and More from the Consumer Electronics Show

The Consumer area of Cisco.com has some videos and more from CES 2010.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:13PM PST

Giving your time and spirit

Normally on this blog we tak about digital experience and the Cisco.com web site, but I thought I would change the pace a bit and tell you about a great team activity our web teams did recently.  Literally one of the best times I have had at a group event was recently when our Web team spent a few hours helping out at the Second Harvest Food Bank in San Jose, California.

Second Harvest is where local nonprofit agencies turn to get donated, surplus, and purchased food at no cost. Last year they distributed almost 40 million pounds of nutritious food to South Bay families. They’re very organized at Second Harvest and set us up assembly line style to load pasta, cereal, beans, and canned meals, veggies, and fruit into individual boxes which then can be distributed to local nonprofits and on to local families.

As you have probably read elsewhere, Cisco as a company is very supportive of employees giving our time back to the community, and many thousands of Cisco employees are involved in all varieties of volunteer acivities throughout the year. I think group activities like this are particularly rewarding since they get a whole team involved. Several teams from our web and marketing groups got involved at Second Harvest this year, and will continue to do so.

Of course, it feels good to help out an agency that provides the makings for so many nutritious meals. But it was also rewarding for the folks on our team to work together on something other than our day job of producing Web content for Cisco.com. We’re definitely going to sign up for this again, and if your organization is looking for a rewarding “teambuilding” activity that can do some good I heartily recommend a group volunteer activity such as working at your local food bank, planting trees, cleaning up local parks, or myriad other activities.

Here are some photos from our experience. Happy Holidays from the Cisco.com web teams!

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 12:36PM PST

New on Cisco.com: Service Request history at your fingertips

Last week, we rolled out a new feature on Cisco.com that will be of particular interest if you enter or track service requests for support.

Now, if your online account is associated with service requests, you can log in and access these capabilities via a new module in My Cisco called Recent Service Requests.  The new feature provides quick access to the latest 50 open and closed service requests.

This new release also includes:

• A “See All” page that allows you to view, hide and sort your service requests
• Quick access to links to open/query service requests in TSRT
• A Recent Service Request details page that provides additional information on each service request
• A secure, flexible web service that allows other Cisco-hosted applications to query and render relevant information on service requests

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 06:10AM PST

Wolly mammoths, Web sites and 7 +/- 2

Web design professionals often work to George A Miller’s credo that humans can best manipulate “seven (plus or minus two)” items in their working memory. This 7 +/- 2 guideline isn’t a bad model to follow for keeping things simple on Web sites, where we all know that spewing your visitors with too much information will overwhelm them and could cause them to run away to the next site.

But in his latest column, Web usability expert Jacob Nielsen posits that 7 +/- 2 only goes so far as a guideline. In addition to reducing noise, it’s important to focus on making abstract concepts more concrete and accessible.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:37AM PST

Great Web writing is link writing

Recently I posted a short video interview with web usability expert Gerry McGovern about why its so hard to create usable web sites.
 
But there are fairly easy things you can do to make your web site more usable (and, frankly, we can do the same here at Cisco on our Web sites).
 
Gerry has been helping us understand various experiences across our web sites, and one bit of advice he gives us at Cisco is “write simpler links.”
 
Here’s another video snippet from Gerry that gets right to the point.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 06:05AM PST

Good old fashioned web publishing, modernized

For all of the TelePresence, WebEx, Flip video sharing, and other collaborative tools we use in designing and running our web sites, I’m always struck by how some traditional techniques still work, and how nicely new collaboration tools can blend with the traditional approaches.

This week, as you probably know, Cisco introduced some pretty exciting collaboration products, so it was interesting for me to see our pre-launch meetings where we used some of those same products to bring the launch together.

Here’s the San Jose portion of some of our Web team working hard Friday afternoon at checking dozens of pages, pictures, and videos (and scores of links). What you don’t see is the team members who are in many other locations, all connected in via a WebEx meeting and collaborating seamlessly through shared screens, online messaging, and audio conferencing. It’s interesting how, though people always like to gather together in a physical location, the folks who were in remote locations were very much embedded in the meeting, thanks to everyone’s shared focus on the WebEx screens.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 07:30AM PST

More for fans of Cisco TelePresence (and 30 Rock)

I noticed this on NBC’s 30 Rock site… some behind-the-scenes footage of Alec Baldwin and team prepping for the bedbugs scene that features Cisco TelePresence.

It’s fun to see how over-the-top writing, over-the-top comedic acting, and precise editing and timing come together to make a scene really funny.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:20AM PST

Actress Ellen Page goes home page

Academy Award nominee Ellen Page (from Juno, Whip It, and of course X-Men: The Last Stand) adorns our home page today, which links to a really cute video of her interacting with her home town doctor via Cisco TelePresence.

Enjoy!

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 06:33AM PST

Cisco TelePresence for Design Collaboration

Last year, I blogged about some projects we’ve done using Cisco TelePresence for usability testing and customer interviews.  We have also begun using Cisco TelePresence quite a bit for collaborative design.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 11:30AM PST

30 Rock Preview: Really funny vignette with Cisco TelePresence

NBC’s 30 Rock is one of my favorite shows. And I’ll be tuning in for sure this Thursday evening (9:30 EST / 8:30 CST / 9:30 PST) to catch a really funny bit where Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) encounters bed bugs, a Cisco TelePresence system and the GE board of Directors.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 07:20AM PST

Why easy web sites are so hard (video)

This past week, Web usability expert Gerry McGovern spent a couple of days with us here at Cisco. We’re always working on improving areas of our Web, and Gerry has been helping us on some detailed research on customers’ and partners’ most important online tasks and experiences.

If you read Gerry’s online newsletters you know one of Gerry’s oft repeated mantras is that good content, well named links, and site simplicity are paramount. The bigger the site, the more important these things are.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 06:15AM PST