A Designer’s View: Winning Red Dot’s “Best of the Best” for Cisco Spark Board

Today feels like what it must be to be a race driver winning the Le Mans or an actor winning the Oscars. As a product designer, it’s an amazing feeling to be awarded “Best of the Best” Red Dot Design Award. No doubt it is a privilege to win this award, but like the race driver at Le Mans, it can’t be done without the team.

The team that developed Cisco Spark Board dared to challenge the norm and to strive to make it almost embarrassingly simple. Most importantly, the team stayed true to the product vision.

We started thinking about how people have changed the way they work, while most meeting rooms haven’t. We looked at the tools people enjoy in their personal lives, such as mobiles and tablets, and we questioned why the enterprise hadn’t yet caught up. Most meeting rooms feel like boxes of disconnected tools that delay meetings and often make it unnecessarily difficult to get things done. And we thought it was just as important to incorporate that people are increasingly working in teams, yet our personal devices are designed for individual use.

So we created a team tablet for the wall. The Cisco Spark Board has the three most important capabilities teams need when they meet:

Presenting

White boarding

Conferencing

We worked to get them absolutely right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YdMXDI_o_Y&feature=youtu.be

Our user experience and industrial designers worked side-by-side with a shared vision for humanizing technology. From the beginning, the design team was determined to take things out of the room. We partnered with the engineering teams to integrate all hardware into the board (including speakers and microphones), to remove the cables, and to hide the camera. We also gave the Cisco Spark Board a “home button” and three large app-like circles on the main screen, so everyone instantly knows how to use it.

Red Dot just recognized the Cisco Spark Board product design with its “Best of the Best” Red Dot award. We made a leap from complex to simple. To me, the award from Red Dot acknowledges that we landed in just the right place. It feels amazing.

Cisco Collaboration also won four other Red Dot Awards this year for the recently announced Cisco Spark Room Kit and other parts of the Cisco Spark family.

Get the executive perspective from Rowan Trollope in “Cisco Spark Board Wins Best of the Best Red Dot Award.”