Cisco IT’s User Experience Playbook: Content, Search, and Collaboration

Have you or one of your co-workers ever said “I can’t find my stuff!”? We’ve heard it a lot. Chapter 3 of Cisco IT’s User Experience (UX) Playbook is dedicated to never having to hear “I can’t find my stuff” again.

According to a 2009 report by IDC, a typical information worker spends 8.8 hours per week searching for information, and more than 40 percent of this time is spent on unsuccessful searches. As a result, information workers spend an additional 2.5 hours per week recreating content they couldn’t find. That’s a total of 11.3 productivity-busting hours per week per employee, representing 24 percent of available time in a 40-hour work week and costing an estimated $18,000 per year per employee.

Cisco’s executive leadership has made it a corporate mandate to connect all employees with a persistent experience across the board. Addressing this pain point is more than just a clean-up exercise; it’s about treating content management as a business process and ensuring findability where context is king.

Chapter 3 of the UX playbook guides us toward using search capabilities, content management, and collaboration to provide ways for employees to create, find, share, and consume the right information at the right time in the right context –simply and securely. We want to improve users’ experience, and ensure productivity and efficiency in the process.

To that end, we have decommissioned a couple of document management platforms with a combined 80 TB of data and introduced a new one. One Search, our new internal search interface, displays results from multiple repositories (the intranet, cisco.com, our internal collaboration platform, etc.) all on one page. It’s a faster, more efficient search experience.

My next blog will be about UX and feedback systems. For a refresher on previous UX playbook topics, Chapter 1 is about understanding the relationship people have with technology, in other words, how our services are consumed by specific business groups. Chapter 2 is about delivering a consistent experience across our services.