webex by CISCO
Powering an inclusive future for all
My journey at webex
There were three phases of my work (and my org) here. Our mission was clear - Transform a legacy video conferencing vendor into a modern, engaging, and efficient collaboration suite.
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Phase 1: Rebuild
Team, Rituals, and Culture
Jul 2018 - Nov 2018
Webex was at a crossroads. The global design organization required a significant change in mindset, work culture, and processes.
There were three areas of focus here:
Org setup, and my leadership team.
Triad (design, PM, eng) working relationship.
Design execution, tools, and quality improvements.
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Phase 2: Renovate
Modernize the suite, and design system
Sep 2018 - Nov 2020
There were foundational experience improvements needed across the suite (knowledge workers to admins). Simplifying core experiences across Meetings, Messaging, Calling & Administration use cases.
In parallel, our design system needed up-leveling to help manifest a coherent experience.
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Phase 3: Rebrand
The all new webex.
Jul 2020 - Nov 2020+
A rebrand was required to change the decades-long perception of Webex. Webex had made large strides in improving user and customer experience.
Our industry, customers, partners, and users needed to see this come to life in a new avatar.
We partnered with AKQA to concept, build and launch a fresh, new identity, that did justice to the overhauled experiences.
A few highlights
There’s a lot to cover from my journey with the Webex org. These are some of the most satisfying in terms of user impact and business outcomes.
eCommerce: webex.com
The competition had begun nipping at our heels, particularly in the SMB space. The small but mighty Webex eCommerce team took on the challenges of improved storytelling, SEO/SEM updates, providing templates for landing pages, and overhauling our purchase journey to support the offerings of the Webex suite.
Some highlights:
I organized the team with a design leader with prior experience in multi-variate testing. We designed various tests to evaluate conversion and settle on long-term solutions for our story.
The team worked closely with our growth marketing team to ensure our content was SEO and SEM optimized.
We overhauled our eComm purchase journey to allow customers to build their cart with features from the suite.
The team rolled in content from different parts of our offering, to give prospects a holistic view of our total offering.
Outcomes:
We saw steady QoQ and YoY improvements in conversion and total revenue booked via our eCommerce channel.
Perception of the webex brand started to improve with our storytelling (as measured by our NPS).
With the templatized approach to landing pages, we saw a steady increase in the velocity of campaigns launched via this channel.
The webex App
Going from a suite of disparate, incoherent apps to a single unified app was not going to be a short-term project. We chose an iterative approach toward this overhaul.
First, we applied a coherency layer to make the apps work together better. Then as the tech allowed us, we started to bring together features like calling, meetings, messaging and more into a unified app on mobile and desktop.
Some highlights:
Culture: With a distributed design team across 3 locations (US, Ireland, China), we needed improvements in culture & operations.
Process: We went from an edict driven culture, to highly collaborative with PM, Eng. & Design working in tandem.
Process: We brought in Figma (the first team to adopt at Cisco) and changed our operating model to support the disparate teams and locations.
Design was regularly leading feature recommendations, with a deeper understanding of data, and its impact on our users.
Outcomes:
We saw a steady increase in the adoption & CSAT of the Webex app.
First, 7 and 30-day retention, which was a leading indicator of long-term retention started to show significant signs of improvement.
With coherency, we also brought industry-leading experiences like automated note-taking & summaries, in-meeting reactions with gesture recognition, and other productivity enhancers.
The all new webex
With updates to both our SMB and Enterprise channels, Webex still faced the need to change its perception as a legacy vendor. I worked closely with Webex leadership to initiate, partner and develop a fresh new brand, with our creative partner AKQA.
Some highlights:
I worked on the initial design brief with my creative direction team.
We put together a list of potential partners and had them present their approach toward this rebrand, to our leadership.
I worked with internal stakeholders to gather the scope of this rebrand.
We picked AKQA as a creative partner to bring this rebrand to life.
My org worked closely with theirs to distill the eventual direction and apply those to our product portfolio.
Outcomes:
Our partners and customers saw immense & immediate value in this rebrand.
This rebrand set the stage for Webex to emerge from the pandemic as a leader in enabling the hybrid work era.
It enabled the transition from Webex being seen as a video conferencing vendor to a suite of collaboration tools.