Cisco global web redesign - technical & UX copy
01 — Project details
Cisco is a huge company - a true global leader in its target market. And it's got a website to match.
Yep, the Cisco website is enormous! I worked on the redesign for around two years.
In partnership with senior leaders, the global brand team and other writers, I was part of a core team writing new ecommerce pages for Cisco's world-class technical products.
A mix of creative, technical and functional copy, I took the lead on some UX writing parts of the project, including CTA optimisation and sense-checking customer journeys.
The results were pretty impressive: 😮
10% increase in homepage visits
50% increase in ‘Click to chat’ across cisco.com Networking pages
190% increase in clicks to ‘How to buy’
400% increase in SaaS trials for reworked pages
02 — Creative process
Cisco's products are technical. But their website needed to be human.
Pre-redesign, Cisco's web pages were full of technical gobbledegook.
Of course, Cisco's audience of IT managers understands lists of features and technical specs. But like all us humans, what they're most interested in is how a product can make their lives easier. Things like:
How a more reliable industrial router means they don't have to stay late at work to get things up and running again.
Intelligent monitoring software that helps them find and fix problems before they happen, so they don't get a call at midnight saying the system's gone down.
Of course, Cisco still needed the technical specs and the lists of features. But the most important piece of copy on each page was the banner heading, because that was the main place we could speak about benefits, and reach people on an emotional level.
To get the banner copy right, I'd start with learning about each product (which meant going from 0 to 60 pretty quickly in most cases).
Then I'd devote a good chunk of the time I'd set aside for the whole page to the 50 or 60-character headline to go in the main banner.
Because after all, IT managers are human, too.
At the end of the project, I developed a 40-page copywriting guide for Cisco. The aim was to help non-writers understand what makes good copy, so they could create better, more engaging web pages.
