One call icon for 10 devices
ABOUT CISCO SYSTEMS
Cisco is one of the networking giants with 72,000 employees spread across the world.I was part of Cisco Unified Communication team from 2008 until 2012 based in their research centre in Galway, Ireland.
THE PROBLEM
While being known for their telephony and communication products there had been less emphasis on the user experience of the product suite leading to a very disconnected and disparate suite of products.
An initiative was undertaken by Cisco to bring a unified experience across all their product range including visual styles, common telephony interactions and a revised range of hardware. This effort went under the codename of “Futurama”.
RESEARCH
Ethnographic research on a range of companies was conducted over a 6 week period. We identified the common interactions and built strategies around how we would represent elements like online presence across mobile.
GOAL
A large part of my work would have been to provide visual direction for a desktop client “Jabber” which was available on both Windows, Mac and Mobile as well as author the Cisco Icon Guidelines
THE FINAL DESIGN
As a result of this work we were able to provide common interactions for calling, video conferencing and collaboration across phones, video. Customer satisfaction rates increased steadily in the 6 months after we introduced Futurama versions of the product range.