Website redesigns can be daunting, especially with established sites. In the case of Cisco’s Networking Academy, the website acts as the place of login for students and instructors. However, it also plays a huge role with potential new instructors and students. Crafting a site experience for these two audiences forced us to prioritize user needs. Here’s a summary of the work.

Diving into the analytics

I began by doing a deep dive into the existing site traffic, using Google Analytics.

Existing annual site traffic: 30+ million users
Existing homepage user experience: 20 button or link choices, plus an additional 45 top navigation choices

From this analysis, we determined there were simply too many potential navigational paths being presented to users. This was diverting traffic away from sections of the site that we wanted to prioritize.

User flow mapping

As mentioned above, prioritization of site goals was crucial in order to focus our audience towards specific user flows. Here is the list we came up with:

Enroll in a first-time course now online
Search for and find an academy
Sign up to teach our courses
Log in to your account

Based on this prioritization, we were able to cut the number of homepage navigation choices down from 45 to 19.

Competitive audit

Next up, I conducted a review of the competitive landscape, looking at both traditional education institutions and those companies offering online course enrollment.

One key thing stood out from both audits - the category page.

The category page is a section of the site that focuses on a broader category or topic, and then showcases the course pathways offered to help a student land a job within that category. We decided to add this into our user flow.

Click on the images below to see some of the screenshots from the competitive audit.

Looking outside the industry

As part of the competitive review, I also tracked down non-industry related examples to use as inspiration for the wireframes and site design. I find this to be an important step that is often missed.

View Inspiration Board

Rapid prototyping

This led to some rapid prototyping and iterations. Back then, I did a lot of this quick iteration work on whiteboards or yellow legal pads. Now, I do more of it with post-it notes and software such as Mural or Balsamiq.

After multiple rounds, we decided to abandon the use of audience segmentation blocks on the homepage, and instead, we chose to give full priority with the bulk of the page to a single user — the new student. Click on the images below to see them in more detail.

Additionally, I’ve collected some of the key mockups and documentation from this process and put them into one PDF. There is so much detail in this PDF and if you are curious about my process or you want to improve your own processes, I encourage you to check this out.

View the Deck

Gaining consensus and executing the plan

At this point we needed to accomplish multiple things in tandem:

Gain the buy-in of internal stakeholders on this new approach
Begin collecting assets and writing copy (the entire tone of voice for the site would be shifting)
Hire an agency to do the visual designs based on our wireframes
Work with the development team and our analytics contractor to prepare for SEO implications, redirects, metadata, and the updated site navigation

I’ve collected samples from this stage for you to take a look at. Or, you can browse the completed site by visiting Cisco Networking Academy.

Copy Doc Template

Although I don’t use this template on many projects anymore, it was very helpful for this Cisco project, where we were in a Microsoft Office environment, working remotely with multiple review stakeholders. Feel free to download the template to use for your own projects.

Download the Copy template

Results

In the year since launch, we saw:

33% increase in new users
41% increase in page views
74% of homepage traffic now taking a course or enrollment related action, most of this traffic going to our newly designed category pages
Leading to over 1 Million online enrollments through the website in FY18, up from ~600k the year before

In Summary

It was incredible to see the nearly overnight change in our quarterly results, simply from restructuring the site, rethinking user flows, updating the tone of voice, and applying a fresh design. I wonder how many other sites would benefit from this kind of work?
To that point above, it’s very important to really evaluate the problem before jumping into a solution. So often I see organizations go right to paid ad campaigns or ebook creation for lead generation, without truly understanding which problem they have — a quantity problem, a quality problem, or a conversion problem. (among other problems of course)
While there’s great value in becoming a specialist (i.e. designer, copywriter), it’s also very helpful for larger projects like this one to be a generalist. Generalists know how to break down silos and move between disciplines, translating jargon in the process, and ensuring everyone stays focused on the most important details (which too often does not happen).
Lastly, this is another one of those projects that has survived the test of time. A majority of the work we did here still exists on the site today, more than four years later.

Full Website Redesign for Cisco