How Cisco Revolutionized Their Digital Infrastructure Using Optimal
American multinational technology conglomerate
Powering the digital infrastructure of organizations worldwide, Cisco continues to set industry standards for networking excellence and technological innovation. The exceptional user experiences across Cisco's vast digital portfolio aren't accidental—they're the result of methodical research and optimization through Optimal's comprehensive UX platform. Cisco has transformed fragmented digital touchpoints into unified, intuitive experiences that seamlessly serve their complex ecosystem of employees, developers, and enterprise customers.
Challenge: Navigating Complex Digital Ecosystems
Cisco faced significant challenges managing their vast digital ecosystem spanning internal employee resources, development portals, e-commerce platforms, and collaboration tools. With diverse user groups including employees, developers, and external customers, Cisco needed to create intuitive information architectures that could serve each audience effectively.
Additionally, the company needed to optimize their mobile application and Webex collaboration suite—ensuring streamlined experiences for both internal teams and external partners in an increasingly remote-first work environment.
Solution: Engineering the Optimal Digital Architecture
Cisco implemented Optimal's platform to address these information architecture challenges systematically:
- For internal systems, Cisco conducted specialized tree testing exercises on their IT services and employee resources webpages, helping them evaluate how effectively employees could navigate critical internal systems, with the explicit goal to "improve findability of essential workplace resources."
- For developer-facing systems, Cisco deployed card sorting studies to assess their Developer Portal information architecture. This approach helped them understand how developers conceptualized and categorized API documentation and development resources.
- For customer-facing platforms, Cisco conducted open card sorting with external stakeholders to optimize the product root page structure and ran hybrid card sorting to gain insights on new features within their 'Estore' e-commerce platform.
Results: Connectivity That Matters
Cisco's strategic application of Optimal’s platform delivered significant improvements:
- The tree testing of internal IT services identified navigation bottlenecks that, once resolved, reduced support tickets related to resource location and increased employee productivity.
- The card sorting exercises for the Developer Portal revealed distinct mental models between different developer segments, enabling Cisco to create role-optimized navigation paths that decreased time-to-implementation for API integrations.
- The open card sorting with external stakeholders transformed the product root page structure, resulting in an increase in user engagement and higher conversion rates on their e-commerce platform.
- Mobile application optimization through card sorting established a more intuitive navigation framework, increasing mobile engagement metrics and improving customer satisfaction scores.
Networking Long-Term Excellence
Cisco's investment in information architecture research continues to yield ongoing benefits:
- The refined Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) platform structure following card sorting exercises has enhanced collaboration capabilities, contributing to more efficient remote work processes across global teams.
- Multiple card sorting studies on various aspects of the Webex suite have streamlined the collaboration experience, making Cisco's platform more competitive in the crowded virtual meeting space.
- The optimized e-commerce experience has strengthened relationships with enterprise customers, making self-service purchasing more efficient and reducing the sales cycle for standard configurations.
- Cloud networking nomenclature improvements informed by survey research have created more intuitive product naming conventions, addressing a long-standing pain point in customer understanding of Cisco's complex solution ecosystem.
Cisco's strategic approach reveals how advanced UX insights convert complex information structures into powerful business drivers, elevating technical frameworks beyond mere functionality to become competitive differentiators that enhance workforce productivity, accelerate developer engagement, strengthen customer relationships, and drive sustainable growth in the crowded technology sector.
Want to learn how you can get started gathering meaningful user insight with Optimal? Reach out to us today.
