Martin Hardee

I’ve often written about how we optimize to our Customers’ and Partners’ top journeys across our web sites and mobile apps. We’ve found that focusing relentlessly on the top things that visitors do with us online (versus following the latest cool digital fads) helps us stay g…

It’s fun seeing some of the quirky examples of home pages on web sites today, including Amazon’s retro “April 1, 1999” page. I can’t think of a time we’ve ever done anything like that on Cisco.com, mainly because we don’t want to distract customers from the…

In case you missed it, Cisco now has a tablet version of our flagship app.  And it’s great. Some new features include: Products use a ‘touch’ visual navigation structure Quicker navigation through ‘bookmarking’  without the need to login Video Datasheets delivered via the tablet app Comprehensive I…

This recent post in the Harvard Business Review, Your Digital Strategy Shouldn’t Be About Attention, is a good reminder that the best digital experiences come from listening to your visitors and then anticipating what they want. We’re tried to follow that philosophy on Cisco.com and in o…

My colleague Bill Skeet published an interesting blog a few weeks ago about “Invisible Change” — the improvement and innovation that happens quietly in digital experiences such as web sites and mobile apps. You may have noticed — or not noticed — this phenomenon on web sites you vi…

There’s a pretty great, short post from Business Insider last year that’s been getting re-circulation recently. It’s one-sentence summaries of famous business books like The Innovator’s Dilemma, Good to Great, Outliers, Purple Cow and The Lean Startup. I particularly liked BI’s short summary E…

First impressions really matter. We know this intuitively, and you may also have seen the stats that say it takes web visitors less than two-tenths of a second to form a first impression, and just 2.6 seconds for a user’s eyes to land on that area of a website that most influences their first impres…

Recently at CiscoLive!, we spent a full week with customers and partners doing in-detail usability tests of Cisco.com and some of our mobile sites and apps. This is one of the main methods we use to make our web and mobile easier. What’s a usability test? Something different than you might think. Wh…

There’s a nice article by Web analysts SiteIQ this month about Cisco.com search, with the flattering headline “Cisco aces search again…” The post points out how we do little things like how we: 1. Link to Google for more search, in case you didn’t find what you were loo…