A New Look for Cisco Product Documentation

Did you know this is the first time that the Books and Chapters have  received an update in over 10 years?  Over 10,000 Books and 150,000 related chapters have been updated with a new, more flexible format.  The new design addresses the top pain points voiced by customers and this was further refined and validated with user research sessions. One in 10 users accesses these documents, representing over 8.8 Million visits a month to Cisco.com.

We included the same features found on the single HTML pages, including breadcrumb navigation, responsive content, downloadable versions, recommendations, and back-end instrumentation to allow future enhancements.

In addition, the new format for Books and Chapters includes:

Links to the Book and Chapter contents at the top.

The bar with the Book Contents ‘sticks’ to the top of the page so that the Download (for PDF, Mobi, and ePub) and Print options are always available.

And a floating ‘Top’ button will take you to the top of the document at any time.

Example of new look for Cisco product documentation pages.

So What’s Next?

We are actively gathering and analyzing feedback from this first version to guide updates to the design.  And we are working on functionality that will let you search across the entire set of chapters for a text string without the need to download the entire book’s PDF.  The search box for desktop screen sizes is targeted for release early this summer.   A follow on release will enable the search on mobile devices.  And the mobile-friendly layout for localized content is targeted for completion by the end of 2016.

Have suggestions to make it better?  Let us know either by providing feedback directly from any document or by commenting on this article.

– By Joann Hartman, Christopher Bey, and Vipul Ashta

And if you are curious about the announcement that started it all: Cisco.com goes Mobile – One Page at a Time