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January 30, 2008
The New Tabs on Cisco.com
This is a little thing, but we updated the look and behavior of tabs across many areas of Cisco.com. Here's a video about it:
Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience
Tunes: Air Traffic: Time Goes By
Posted by Martin Hardee at 10:17 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
January 26, 2008
Beauty in Utility: Trash from X Games
My wife gets all the cool asignments. A few months ago it was Fenway Park and the World Series. This weekend she's working the Winter X Games. And, all I got out of it was these lousy cell phone photos of trash cans from Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen. (Of course, they're beautiful):
Yes, there is a web user experience tie-in to this. If you're involved in design of your company's web experience, you could learn a thing or two from stylish trash cans.
As I have blogged elsewhere (about trash cans at Disneyland), there is an interesting design challenge to making aethetically pleasing rubbish cans for public places: They need to be obvious enough to get people to use them, and yet they shouldn't be an eyesore. And they need to be "on brand" for the situation. The Winter X Games trash cans fit the bill on all counts.
The utilitarian web parallel is the search boxes, buttons, tabs, and other functional components that are absoluetly essential to the usefulness of a web site -- you want them to be stylish, but not so big and bold that they overpower everything else that your web site visitors are trying to do. They need to be pleasant and functional for your site visitors.
On Cisco.com, we're spending a lot of time lately thinking about not only designing the beauty of things (such as what we feature on our home page), but also designing for utility such as the new beta search and related popular pages box. While we don't consciously think of this work as relating to the X Games or theme park experience (including the utilitarian things like trash cans or water fountains), perhaps that would be humbling.
More updates ahead for Cisco.com, and I promise they will be not only aesthetically pleasing but also highly useful!
Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience X Games
Tunes: New Radicals: You Get What You Give
Posted by Martin Hardee at 01:35 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
January 24, 2008
Personas Come of Age
It's interesting to see something from the inner depths of the user-centered design world suddenly exploding into the mass media. This has happened recently with personas.
Personas are a tool we use at Cisco in designing products and web sites -- a way of profiling a "prototypical" user (that might be you!) based on our interviews and research.
For instance, one of our personas (at right) is named "Millie" and she's a small business owner who juggles appointments, phones, deals, and employee assignments. Sometimes we use real photos; sometimes we use figurines or illustrated comic figures to represent our personas. But they're always accompanied by a lot of background information to help us understand different types of visitors to our web sites. And they are always based on what we learn from visits or interviews with real customers.
This last week I've seen in-your-face instances of personas used in mass media, and I think it's an indication that companies (and even ad agencies) are becoming more oriented to their users.
The first instance was a campaign running on Amazon.com around tax preparation, using characters from the NBC's The Office to help you match yourself with the right taxpayer "persona:"
The neat thing is, they carried the metaphor one step further to show a mini-persona about each character. So, if you identify with Jim (the procratinator) you got this special page explaining various products that are right for you (OK, it's the same products in each case, but with a different leadin):
The other interesting campaign running is from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor's Bureau, where they invite you to "discover your Vegas persona," as if this is a common term known to the general public:
They're even using the tagline "discover your Vegas persona" on network televisions ads. If that's not a sign that personas are coming of age, I don't know what is!
P.S. A great book on personas is The Persona Lifecycle by Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt.
Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience
Tunes: Gwen Stefani: The Sweet Escape
Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:29 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
January 14, 2008
Page Grids (are Good)
Sometimes I think some of our web pages look, well, lopsided.
Not everything, mind you. Not our nicely laid out home page or our wonderfully appointed news pages, of course. But look at some pages and you wonder if everything is lined up quite right.
And other sites, too: This is a problem which many, many famous web sites display, and it's all on account of something called page grids.
I have often pondered this issue, and was delighted when a friend of mine pointed me to an entry from Khoi Vinh's Subtraction blog all about page grids. There is more to grids in Khoi's linked PDF presentation from last year's South by Southwest (SXSW) conference than you probably ever imagined there was to know.
The extensive presentation contains great advice for all web designers.
P.S. Here's a sample page from the presentation:
(Trust me: It's more interesting than it looks!)
Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience
Tunes: Army of Me: Perfect
Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:45 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
January 07, 2008
Some Design Notes on the New Consumer Area
Coinciding with the launch of our Consumer Experience blog, and the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, we've also updated the consumer area of Cisco.com so that it better showcases the "Visual Networking Experience. "
One of the interesting visual challenges was how to combine the black backgrounds featured in our CES presence, along with the smoke-like white plasma that you see in the backgrounds, and make them play nicely with the rest of Cisco.com, which as you know is pretty much comprised of white backgrounds and lighter blues and grays (with the proud blue and red logo, of course).
I think we came up with something that works very nicely:
The black background theme ties in nicely with what you'll see at CES, and by contrast the while border fits it in gracefully with the rest of Cisco.com and its predominant white background.
There's a linkage to our SecondLife Campus, links to the new Cisco Consumer Experience blog, and links to related Cisco products A special tip-of-the-hat to Art on our brand team, Chris on our visual team, and to Steve who drove the whole update program and also came up with the stylish concave line heading the secondary pages.
Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:08 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
