December 17, 2007

Does Santa Do WebEx?

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

Does Santa do WebEx conferencing? It might explain how he's able to visit so many places in one night!

Posted by Martin Hardee at 10:15 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

BusinessWeek on Cisco and Your User Experience

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

Posted by Martin Hardee at 06:58 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 07, 2007

Do That Searchy Thing

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.

Normally, if you search for a topic on Cisco.com or most other sites -- whether it's a really technical topic or something more general -- you're innundated with results from all over the site.

For instance, say you're in a small business just getting into networking and you're curious about a topic like "difference between a router and a switch"...

Search1.routersiwtch.jpg

On Cisco.com, you'll get a rich assortment of 4,000 results, and frankly the ones at the top may not be what you want...

Why such a jumble of results? Because, really, how's the search engine to know what you're trying to find? Or that in fact you're in a small business as opposed to, say, running a big enterprise IT group?

But, if you try the same search in our new search beta, you'll notice you get a lot more control...

Look on the left side of the picture: You can actually narrow down, filter, or expand searches based on criteria like business size (here's a close-up)...

So that you get a nice subsetted list of the documents that are really appropriate to what you're looking for (just three relevant entries!)...

And can zoom in on just the right document...

There are a lot of nifty features, like auto-suggest of search terms, which I'll write more about soon.

And, since this is Beta and we're still doing a lot of tuning, be sure to leave feedback via the floating feedback link on the page.

Enjoy!

P.S. You'll notice there's a link to the new Search Beta in our regular search results, too. Be sure to compare and let us know which you like better and why.

Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:50 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

December 01, 2007

Speaking of Web 2.0 Icons: Share

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

A group is trying to consolidate, with a simple "share" icon.

Hmmm... seems ready made for The Human Network.

More at shareicons.com.

Posted by Martin Hardee at 10:22 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

RSS Icons Get Hip

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.

You can read a short history of the icon and and overview of some examples that have evolved in Smashing Magazine's RSS Best Design Practice and Icons.

P.S. That costume was created by Danny Holland from my old design team (who says there's an embarassing flaw -- can you spot it?), and featured in this video on YouTube produced by Danny (yes, that's me playing "RSS Thing").