Cisco is best known for communications hardware expertise, but the company is involved with many other products aimed at enhancing communication. In this presentation, Cisco draws from their deep pool of resources to offer three highly relevant perspectives on collaboration:
User experience reseracher Alison Ruge discusses investigations into how users collaborate using today's and tomorrow's technologies. Alison has found that some of the most commonly-used communication tools actually inhibit collaboration and how organizations can become truly collaborative. She offers examples of technologies that promote more effective collaboration and describes how our changing culture will force changes in the way we collaborate in the future.
As head of user experience design for Cisco's Webex, Oliver Wenz understands the challenges of working with team members working in multiple time zones around the world. With teams in Snata Clara and Shanghai, Oliver says better collaboration comes from systems which simplify user experiences. He believes systems that maximize face-to-face interaction, even virtually, overcome the challenges of a multi-cultural and multi-lingual global workforce.
Jenni Kim talks about the evolution of a simple video sharing system into what Cisco calls "YouTube for the enterprise," Cisco's Show and Share. Focusing on typical use cases for sharing videos, she provides the results of Cisco's user interface analysis and explains how they determined the key goals for the redesign of the system.
(We regret that the audio quality of this program is not up to our usual standards, due to a technical problem with the live recording.)
Lin Brown, Ph.D., is director of User Experience at Cisco. His teams in San Jose and Bangalore design user experiences for a wide variety of Cisco products, services, and solutions, such as data centers, DVRs, smart buildings, and smart cities. He has many years of industry experience at Xerox, Sun, Inktomi, and Cisco. He earned a Ph.D. at Georgia Tech, and is author of Human Computer Interface Design Guidelines.
Alison Ruge has been advocating for users, evangelizing for user experience, and leading user research projects for product and business model design projects for nearly 20 years. She managed the qualitative research team at New York's Organic Online office during the dot-com era, created the Interaction Design group at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and has been integral to Cisco's Voice Technology Group's user-centered design process since its inception in 2004. She received her Master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, specializing in interactive design for intrinsically motivating user experiences.
Oliver Wenz heads user experience design at Cisco/Webex. His teams in Santa Clara and Shanghai design award-winning products and solutions for consumer and enterprise applications, social networking, instant messaging, voice, video, on-line meetings and mobile applications. Oliver loves designs that are simple, relevant, and fun. Design work included clients like L'Oreal, TDK, Phil Collins, BMW, Audi, Ford, WalMart, Hallmark, HarmanPro, Motorola, and others. Oliver holds an MBA from the University of Cologne in Germany with advanced studies in industrial design at University of Wuppertal in Germany.
Jenni Kim is a user experience manager for Cisco Digital Media Systems. Jenni and her team drive the creation of designs for web, TV, and phone for the digital media product portfolio. Previously, Jenni led the User Experience program for Cisco.com, helped establish the first set of UE standards for the Cisco web site, and pioneered many programs to help promote the user-centered design process across Cisco. Jenni received her BA in Mass Communications from UC Berkeley.
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