Chad Vavra | Design Director | chad@chadvavra.com

Process

Data: Addressing the scale of Cisco on the web site required careful research, planning, and collaboration across the enterprise. There are many customer-driven inputs that influenced the work we did. With all of traffic the site generates there was no shortage of analytics. Some of the insights we gathered were that the site is largely used as a functional utility than a browsing experience. It's also the entry-point to the Cisco brand. Visitor use the homepage as a navigation tool to get to support, Netacademy, and search. Additionally we used Adobe Analytics and ContentSquare to see click-paths and journeys. I also led an agency RFP process, bringing half-a-dozen vendors up to speed on various aspects of the site and having them deliver their recommendations. This ranged from visual design, to supporting SaaS product, Ecommerce, and UX.

User Research: In addition to gathering feedback through a form on the site we conducted continuous user research at all Cisco events. The team would attend to recruit and interview customers and partners to make sure that we were building the right thing for them. High-level needs rarely changed, but doing the interviews allowed us to uncover important insights about their decision making process. Data and Research insights informed our approach to page templates built with the new design system "Muse.

Audiences & Segments: Cisco is made up of seven portfolio's of products and each portfolio uses a different set of personas. We made the decision to use the brand and marketing audiences and Segments for the Cisco.com platform. These range from the C-suite to implementors and partners. Building templates this way allowed each product marketing team adaptability of content to their personas while keeping the user experience consistent across the site.

Visual Design: When I joined, Cisco.com did not reflect the modern approach to software that the company was moving to. The visual design and UX teams collaborated to come up with and test multiple visual styles with internal and external customers and partners. The goal wasn't just to look good, but to look good and uniquely Cisco. The feedback from that research not only influenced the look and feel, but also the approach to content strategy with cleaner, more open pages and fewer words.

Development: A measure for success that we had identified early on was based on site performance. Specifically, using Google's Lighthouse tool we were able to identify technical issues that were degrading the user experience. Javascript and 3rd party tagging were the biggest culprits so we established new governance, enforced by code, that limits the negative effects on user experiences.

Journey Optimization: In enterprise organizations, with solutions made up of multiple products, there are many teams working independently on experiences that will be part of a customer's journey. For Cisco marketing, including Cisco.com, we had paid and organic awareness, websites, events, emails, partner marketing and more. Getting all of the elements in a journey to work together was no small task but it improved greatly when I developed our Design and UX Reviews process. The purpose of the review was so the teams could collectively experience all of the content side by side and hear from the creators what the intended goal was. The shared understanding allowed teams to optimize their messaging and timing so that journeys are seamless.

Cisco.com

Role: Head of UX and Content Strategy Team: 10 fulltime / 30+ contractors

Role: Head of UX and Content Strategy
Team: 10 fulltime / 30+ contractors