Unfortunately, usually not. For anything complex, you probably need to have more talent on board than just the proverbial 'artist with purple hair.' Creating a Web site or even a section of one is a lot like building a house, where you need an architect, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, etc. who come on board during the life of the project as needed.

Here is how I describe some common design and development roles compared to building a house:

User Researchers describe your housing and lifestyle needs and desires based on the fact that you have a small family and 4 dogs.

Business Analysts tell you whether you need a bungalow, a house or a cathedral.

Experience Designers and Information Architects determine that you probably need a 2,900-sqft ranch, and determine that it has a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, etc and then provide the blueprints and maybe a 3D simulation

Visual Designers paint the walls and specify a tasteful decorating scheme.

Producers / Site Strategists determine what furniture you need in the different rooms, and maybe get to choose the color within the visual designers guidelines (probably working with a visual design)

Engineers are the ones who actually build the frame, install the plumbing and electric, hang the drywall.

Quality Assurance experts make sure everything is to code.

Publishers are the room stagers who not only deliver furniture into the house but set it up in the rooms (over and over again every day!)

RSS is the paper boy who throws the newspaper in your front yard.

Photo credit: Concrete Forums

Technorati Tags: Cisco Design Web-Design CustomerExperience

We look forward to enhancing the customer experience in future releases and more industry recognition in the process.

Here are our listings:

Websites

Cisco.com, for the IT Hardware/Software category

The Human Network, for Telecommunications

Interactive Advertising

Cisco.com – Consumer, for Rich Media Single: B to C

The Human Network, for Rich Media Single: B to B

Mobile

Welcome to the Human Network, for Mobile Marketplace & Services

Best of luck to all of our colleagues!

By the way, this is based on an internal video we recorded back in December, whose content we can now show you now that various web site sections have launched. We'll do more detailed behind-the-scenes episodes in the future, so let me know about topics you would like to see.

Technorati Tags: Cisco Design Web-Design CustomerExperience

P.S. Cordell is a featured speaker at Adaptive Path's upcoming MX design management conference, which is also mentioned in the article.

So, you can see Cordell in San Francisco at MX (April 20-22), or Martin in New York (April 11th) or London (May 23rd) or San Francisco (June 20th) at Nielsen Norman.

Go ahead and start adding your perspective and learn from your colleagues viewpoints on the Support Wiki.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out it wasn't my dog (or even me) that did the bulk of the work in redesigning the Cisco.com Support area, though we were cheering the team along all the way.

And, if you were among the multitudes who gave us feedback at Networkers or in our many lab usability tests, in many ways you were designers and instigators of this new design.

Thank you!

“This works great. I love the filters, definitely helps me find what I'm looking for. I actually was led to content that I may have not normally reviewed.”

“The new 'search' concept is great!! The filter of results based on categories is a huge improvement.”

“Finally! what the [heck] took so long. the left side "filter by" was a long time coming.”
“Put this into production IMMEDIATELY”

“The new search, especially the sidebar filters, is absolutely GREAT. Implement this!”

“I love the new interface and the ability to quickly drill down on the types of documents I am looking for (specifically Design Guides, this time)”

"Looks much nicer, love search assist"

"Very useful. Could not find stuff 2 days ago on CCO - but can now find with the new search tool."

"Huge improvement." Ability to find release notes based on IOS - could not find before. Felt relevancy was better. Searched for: 12.2(18) sxf release notes - was able to get release notes.

"Certainly a step forward."

“Looks great when are you going to make it standard”

“It found the information needed at the first try.”

“The search result is more specific to what I need.”

And some constructive criticism:

“Please show more of the title at the top of each item. Right now it is difficult to differentiate between matches that have long titles that all begin with the same words.” (Title) - (We're working to fix this.)

“Negative: the Headers of the result links are too short.” (Title) - (We're working on this, too)

“Jeez, can you at least add more digits of the title???” (Title) - (And we're working on this one)

“tcp small servers works as a search, but not tcp-small-servers” - (And this one, too)

“I love the new interface and the ability to quickly drill down on the types of documents I am looking for (specifically Design Guides, this time). However, it would be even better if there is an ability to filter OUT things that I know I don't want.” - (We're studying exactly how to approach this kind of problem.)

Ability to use advanced operators to constrain the search (e.g., "inurl:", "filetype:") - (This is also in our "future consideration" list)

In regards to the breadcrumbs - "To me, it seems like it looks like everything else on the page….You'd probably want to emphasize it a little bit more, so someone could say, 'Oh, look! It's showing me that I'm narrowing it down.'" - (Future Consideration – we need to ensure it does not compete visually with the navigators. Stay tuned.)

Several suggested being able to see more search results on a page or to be able to define how many they would see. - (Another one for future Consideration)

Technorati Tags: Search Design Web-Design CustomerExperience