The Business Impact of Design at Cisco

Today is International Design Day, the perfect day to celebrate our recent wins in the globally prestigious iF Design Awards and the perfect day to ask the question: what does it mean?

It’s not an untrue statement to say that design makes things look good. Still, there’s more to the story. Here are three ways in which design creates a positive business impact for Cisco and our customers:

Return on Investment

In Collaboration Devices, we’re acutely aware that our enterprise customers invest a lot of dollars per year into a deceptively simple activity: employees talking to each other. The time we all spend in meetings is substantial— what is the return on the investment for all of those meetings?

The effectiveness of employee-to-employee interactions increases when the meeting technologies they are using are inclusive and easy to follow; when everyone on the meeting can easily hear and be heard, and when anyone with a contribution has a chance to talk. When everyone can join on time, share content easily, catch up if they have to miss the meeting, and when we don’t have to repeat ourselves to be understood, time is saved and the ROI improves. Every second of delay caused by user interface confusion is costly at scale.

In our team, designers are diligently working on several fronts. They aim to streamline common meeting tasks, lighten the cognitive load of system understanding for participants, and innovate new camera angles and views to enhance the sense of presence in remote conversations.

Sustainable Collaboration Devices

The professional title for hardware designers is “industrial designer.” Though it feels like a misnomer, the word “industrial” fits. Manufacturing hardware at scale is of course an industrial process— the materials used are dug up out of the ground, then shaped and formed with massively powerful force.

That’s why one of the business impacts of the design of our hardware is sustainability. A well-designed product can do the same work with fewer resources used to create it. When designers (working closely with engineers) reduce the size of a product, specify recycled materials, and make products easy to disassemble into their recyclable components, the carbon footprint shrinks.

We have some recent success stories. The 9800 series of phones launched last month set the new record for the highest percentage of post-consumer recycled plastic of any Cisco hardware product. Another piece of hardware still in development was significantly reduced in size, with no reduction in performance. Improvements like that have a ripple effect— a smaller product means smaller packaging, and more units fit on a pallet for shipping. Each product and its packaging is lower in weight, saving even more fuel in shipping. Our designers and engineers are finding ways to reduce material waste, reduce mass, and increase recyclability.

There are long-term benefits to sustainable business practices on the user experience side, too. Resting power consumption represents one of the best opportunities to reduce the lifetime carbon footprint of our hardware. Our Collaboration Devices group engineers power-saving modes into our room devices, because the workday is only a portion of every 24-hour cycle. By defining consistent and simple device wakeup behaviors across the portfolio, we maximize power savings while keeping users’ needs front and center. Customers can realize the full benefit of carbon and cost savings, without unhappy team members.

Intuitive and Consistent

The design of our products can help users feel comfortable about using them. Once a little bit of mastery is gained, familiar design cues in subsequent products makes them seem less intimidating. Our promise in Collaboration Devices is an intuitive and consistent look and feel across our portfolio – so that if you learn to use one of our devices, you will have a good chance of finding your way around any of them. Most users will never dissect those details, identifying that the same corner radius or vent pattern has been used on all products. But the similar feeling they get from the exterior design is a clue that the software experience will be familiar too. That’s how design details help users move from phones to video devices to apps with confidence.

IF Design Day Award Wins

So back to that design award. In its 70th year, the iF Design Awards are a globally celebrated competition entered by several thousand designs from over fifty countries around the world. Winning here is recognition that a design holds up against the best of the best in the world. It’s not a beauty contest— awards juries are looking for real innovation and responsibility, and it signals to the world that winning companies are investing to make the world a better place through their products. Cisco, Meraki, and Tandberg have won iF Awards eighteen times in the last twenty years.

This year we celebrate iF Awards for the Cisco Wi-Fi 6E Access Point by the Meraki team, the Cisco Room Bar Pro, and the Cisco Room Kit EQX. Congratulations to the designers, engineers, product managers, and other team members who helped make these truly great products! And happy International Design Day to all.