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

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

The wayback machine

One of the gems of the Internet is the “wayback machine”—the Internet Archive’s archive.org—which can show you a small snapshot of what your web site used to look like in days of yore. Those of us who work on web sites love the Wayback Machine because it shows us how far things have come and also reminds us all of a simpler time on the web.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:59AM PST

Great new page for a great new product

Amid the excitement around last week’s announcement of the Cisco Integrated Services Router Generation 2 (ISR G2), you might have noticed that we did a nice upgrade to the ISR web page on Cisco.com.  The new page contains a lot more information, so you can review product features at a glance.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:50AM PST

Connecting customers, supplier and bamboo (& other stories)

Some new video profiles on Cisco.com show how small businesses are using technology to change things pretty dramatically in their operations.  I love these short videos because they make technology concepts (which could otherwise seem abstract) very tangible.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:55AM PST

P.S. More business twitter tips

Marty Gruhn at Web analysts SiteIQ, who follows IT industry sites, has some good insights about what works and doesn’t for businesses in that space.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:40PM PST

How usable are social media streams?

An interesting post from usability expert Jakob Nielsen on the usability of tweets, RSS feeds, etc.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 04:48PM PST

I love these videos on Cisco.com

I love the new videos on the Borderless Networks page on Cisco.com. They’re short, inspiring and clear and they show the value of using video for collaboration. Look behind the storylines and you’ll realize they also illustrate how IT service delivery models enable you to use any service, from any location, and any device.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:50AM PST

Easy product chooser for small business

In our Small Business area, we recently added a Small Business Product Chooser that helps you decide what kind of product you need based on the unqiue requirements of your environment.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:45AM PST

Fun on Cisco.com: Build your own security comic

Our web and product teams work on some pretty serious and important stuff all year. And we know you work on serious and important stuff all year. So the new “build your own Realm comic” contest on Cisco.com is a nice break for us all.

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Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:15AM PST