Online Experience Category Archives
May 07, 2008
Web Design is Like Building a House
People often ask me to explain why there are different Web design roles and how they fit in creating a Web experience: "Martin," they say, "can I just go find an artist somewhere to redesign the experience on the business-to-business section of the Web sites that I just inherited?"
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.
For Cisco.com, we call on many different roles in designing different areas of the site; even if you have a much smaller web site, you will find that there's a mix of roles needed to create the end experience (and if you use a vendor for web design or hosting or development, they will fill these various roles even if it's just a few people wearing many different hats.)
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
Posted by Martin Hardee at 06:30 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 17, 2008
Cisco's Support Site Wins ASP Award
A couple of weeks after getting great reviews from the folks at Site IQ , The Cisco Support website made the Association of Support Professionals (ASP's) Top Ten Support Sites again this year. We are honored and happy to see the value we are bringing to our user base being recognized by the industry professionals.
The improvements that got us this award are:
1- streamlining the sign on experience where customer identity is shared amongst all sub-sites,
2- rationalizing the download experience by collapsing multiple tools for the same purpose into one,
3- introducing a localized Forums for our growing Polish community, and
4- greatly enhancing the site navigation to optimize getting to appropriate resources and content for a product of interest within 2 clicks.
We look forward to enhancing the customer experience in future releases and more industry recognition in the process.
Posted by Abdul Halabieh at 08:34 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 07, 2008
How We Design for Cisco.com
Here's a video I put together showing a little bit about how we design new areas for Cisco.com (and showing quite a bit of my messy office!)
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
Posted by Martin Hardee at 06:54 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 03, 2008
Interesting Interview on Cisco and User Experience
My colleague Cordell Ratzlaff is featured in an interesting interview about Cisco, user experience, and how he and his team are applying the magic he perfected at Apple and frog Design to create great products and end to end experiences for Cisco. Worth a read.
P.S. Cordell is a featured speaker at Adaptive Path's upcoming MX design management conference, which is also mentioned in the article.
Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:30 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 02, 2008
And in case you can't get enough Cisco user experience
I should probably mention also that I am teaching a full-day course at this year's Nielsen Norman conferences about using consumer web design techniques for corporate and B2B sites.
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.
Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:45 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
March 31, 2008
Good Web Coding Advice
We on the Web team are enjoying this "Design Code" video on YouTube. Nicely done and somewhat more enjoyable than reading a W3C manual!
Posted by Martin Hardee at 09:51 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
March 18, 2008
I wish I spoke more Chinese...
But I still love the Cisco China Human Network section, which I think is very creatively produced...
Posted by Martin Hardee at 02:40 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
February 28, 2008
Nice Kudos for Cisco.com Video
Remember the commentable videos we mentioned recently? Web analysts SiteIQ recently took notice and wrote a very nice review in an article entitled Why Cisco.com Gets Video (and other websites don't), which kind of says it all.
Some excerpts:
- "Cisco.com’s video datasheets are a unique video format that sets new standards across the IT industry."
- "Cisco.com has added to its best practice video behaviors with a new twist on the theme. It has started posting videos that allow Cisco’s product engineers to comment back to customers who post comments on the site. "
- "Although Cisco.com’s videos are hardly the beauty contests seen on most other sites, they have a clear and compelling purpose. They are short (under 4 minutes), to the point—and focus on the kinds of product information and expert discussions that prospects need when they are making a buying decision... I give Cisco.com’s current video strategy and behaviors an A+."
We point out this post because (1) it's irresistible to brag, but also (2) we would really like to see all sites (your site, perhaps?) using a lot more video. If done correctly and simply video can make your site come alive and be an incredibly useful resource to your customers and partners.
Technorati Tags: Web Video Design Web-Design CustomerExperience
Tunes: Cardigans: Lovefool
Posted by Martin Hardee at 11:36 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
February 14, 2008
I Love Genuine Video
First, let me admit that of course I am very fond of the talking Cupid and Easter Bunny.
But, for genuine customer interaction, my favorite video of the week is of Security Technical Marketing Engineer Tom Fulton. Tom is answering a customer's question (via video) about security features on the Cisco 1800 Series Integrated Services Routers:
The neater thing is, this is a video comment back on a question that a customer originally attached to a video! Talk about double recursion!
Have a look at the video comments feature we've added on some of our product pages.
Technorati Tags: Web Video Design Web-Design CustomerExperience
Tunes: Who: The Real Me
Posted by Martin Hardee at 10:50 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)
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)
October 23, 2007
Twitter in the Center of the Action
It is interesting to see the Los Angeles Fire Department using the mobile service Twitter to report minute by minute updates on the Southern California USA fires.
And, KCBS TV doing the same.
Posted by Martin Hardee at 04:41 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
October 19, 2007
Simpler Web 2.0
Thanks to this week's Web 2.0 Conference, much of the buzz in the Valley this week has been about increasingly clever ways to participate in or leverage the social graph.
Well, actually, many of the articles this week talk cryptically about "opening APIs" and competition for your profile and online participation from various online juggernauts, with a dash of Semantic Web thrown in for good meaure -- all of which is probably difficult for most mortals to follow. You probably need a vacation.
If you indeed need a respite from the API mayhem, I suggest two readings:
Cisco's Scott Brown posted a nice overview of how Web 2.0 fits into your world of entertainment and other non-techie stuff in a posting about the "We/Me Movement".
My friend Max Gadney at the BBC pointed me to this vintage posting about the essence of social software by Matt Webb. It's a very nice primer on how to think about interactions of people within groups online, and it's from 2004 -- which is almost century ago in Web 2.0 years!
Enjoy!
Posted by Martin Hardee at 09:58 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
October 08, 2007
Automatic Print Friendliness
Here's something you might not notice at first on cisco.com, but will surely appreciate once you discover it: Automatic print friendliness.
Since we specify print styles in our style sheets, when you print a wide page that looks like this on the screen...
It actually prints out on paper in a nice narrower format like this (without all of the navigation elements that you don't need on a printout)...
A little thing, perhaps, but much nicer than those many sites you go to where the sides of pages are cropped on your printouts because the browser is trying to print the width of the page as seen on screen.
Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:43 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
