The User Experience

This is part of a series on the evolution of the Cisco Collaboration Cloud platform, exploring the technical and design principles behind its unique architecture.

In the last post in this series, Rowan wrote about revolutionizing enterprise communications through the cloud to deliver amazing experiences. I am glad that Rowan mentioned experience, because that happens to be a passion of mine.

For me, experience manifests itself in several ways. It means:

Our technology is integrated and works easily across our platform;

Our technology is intuitive and easy to use by anyone at any level in the organization; and

Most importantly, it means users are delighted in every interaction.

But to deliver amazing experiences, we have to understand how people will use our technology and what they need to accomplish FIRST, before we build anything. When we understand the experience people want, we can tie that to the experience we deliver. Then, and only then, can we build a platform with products that are valuable and desirable.

We do this by leveraging three key design principles across Collaboration. Embedded in everything we do, they put users at the center of our platform and products. These principles are: simplify, connect, and delight.

Simplify: this is all about the experience. You’ve told us you need to connect with your teams quickly, no matter where they are or what device they choose to use. By focusing on a simple, easy-to-use experience, we have technology that brings teams together in an instant with no extra training classes! The mode of connectivity may change between mobile, the desktop, conference rooms, and everything in-between. When we follow this design principle, the experience remains consistent, and easy to use. But we’re not done. Right now, we’re working on further simplifying the meeting experience in ways that people will love.

Connect: our portfolio of products must seamlessly, easily, and naturally connect to each other. In the past, people were stuck with separate tools for messaging, meetings, and calls, which didn’t result in a seamless, simple experience. This just isn’t good enough. By applying this design principle, we have built a seamlessly connected portfolio of collaboration products, giving people a more consistent experience. Now we’re looking to new solutions that help you stay even better connected at work.

Delight: to truly resonate with people, a great collaboration tool must be delightful to use – fun and unique while solving business challenges. This is where our design approach has become a game-changer in the industry. Throughout our development process, we’re constantly looking for ways to add a “wow” factor. If we make our products cool to use, we know you’ll keep coming back for more. We’ve built products that really excite people; now we’re looking for ways to leverage the collective knowledge of our users.

In December, we’ll show you how we are delivering on these key design principles with products that are simple, connected, and delightful. You’ll see how Cisco is innovating faster than our competition, how we’re delivering an incredible experience, and doing it all on a flexible platform built with modern cloud-based technologies.

As I said, I am passionate about “experience.” Our cloud and user-experience is the best in the industry. I look forward to sharing all the progress we have made over the past year at Collaboration Summit. See you there!

At the Cisco Collaboration Summit, we will share all the details of how we have achieved this feat. Please join us for the keynote to hear from SVP Rowan Trollope and Collaboration CTO Jonathan Rosenberg. Register today and watch on December 8 at 9:00 a.m. PST.