An Inside View on the Red Dot Winning Cisco Webex Desk Pro Design

Cisco Collaboration won four Red Dot design awards this year! I am so proud and deeply honoured to receive this recognition for outstanding achievements in design and honoured to accept them on behalf of the amazing team behind these products.

However, at the moment, I am not in our office surrounded by my wonderful team, and I am not sitting in a modern meeting room with our beautifully designed Cisco Webex video collaboration devices that allow me to work seamlessly with colleagues all over the world.

Instead, I’m working from home and excited to be sitting in front of a Webex Desk Pro. Out of all our great award-winning products, this has become my clear favourite the past few weeks. Let me tell you why.

Experience-Driven Design From the Inside Out

The Cisco design team often says that we are product makers, not just designers and that we design our products from the inside out. It starts with defining the experience, and then every design decision or component selection is driven from there.

Webex Desk Pro really started by us looking at people´s experience using desks in modern workplaces today, the activities they do, the things they use and more importantly, what they are trying to accomplish.

Personal office desks, hot-desks, focus rooms and home offices all require a variety of tools to be productive and to provide simple, high-quality work experience. External displays, speakers, webcams, chargers and connectors, keyboard and mouse, notepads, pens, post-it notes and of course laptops and smartphones are all necessities to a modern workflow. Yet all these tools, products and technologies end up demanding a lot of your attention and create visual clutter.

With the Webex Desk Pro, we wanted to honour what a desk is really about – a place to focus. Minimize distractions yet all the tools you need readily available at your fingertips.

We´ve used the same powerful video and audio conferencing technology we use in our meeting room products and combined it with a crystal-clear 27” 4K touch display. We also use a passive cooling solution where the aluminum back of the product distributes the heat, removing the need for a fan for cooling. This means you can see and hear all your work and your colleagues in the highest possible fidelity, with no delay or interruptions to the experience. No interruptions from technology mean more focus, happier colleagues and better meetings and being more productive and creative.

The Desk Pro screen can be adjusted for an optimal position when used as a display and it even has a small light on top to indicate to people around you if you are busy or in a call. It´s another example of how serious we are about helping you stay focused.

The intuitive multi-touch interface makes it easy to use, especially with the stylus, to create whiteboards or post-its directly in a video call with colleagues or when working alone.

We also managed to simplify the connectivity – you can share your screen, use touch-redirect from your PC and charge your laptop all in one single cable, all at the same time. That means whenever you sit down, you don´t need to look for chargers and connectors and you leave the desk with a fully charged laptop. It really is the ultimate convergence device for your desk – an instant office.

Calm Products That Make Technology Invisible and Fit in Anywhere

With all these amazing technologies, we have worked incredibly hard to create a single unit that seamlessly conceals all the technology from the user.  A calm, sculpture-like white object made of high-quality materials with a single pane of glass and a furniture-inspired fabric speaker grill. It makes it look good from any angle and fit naturally into any environment, and simply oozes of quality. The design quality is in a way synonymous with craftsmanship – the attention to every single detail is an expression of how much we care about the end-user experience.  Cutting-edge technology with timeless aesthetics

So, to come back to my point, in the beginning, this product is what has made me able to stay focused and connected and feel effective, inspired and fulfilled at work while working from home. But also, it naturally fits into my home and does not remind me of work when I am not using it. A beautiful display that I really enjoy having on display at home.

Cisco Collaboration won four Red Dot design award in total this year, including “best of the best” for the Webex Room Panorama and Cisco Headset 730. Read more about these products here.

Learn More

Welcome to the Future of Collaboration with the Cisco Webex Desk Pro

The Rise of Webex Rooms

Future of Work. On Display. At ISE 2020

Amazing Spaces to Get Stuff Done: A View from ISE

Connect with all of the Webex Rooms blogs