Stefan Eriksson, 2016-03-09
Go for simplicity
Report from Enterprise Connect:
“Not more than one click!” “I’m crazy passionate about user experience.” Two quotes that point directly to what I found most interesting the second day at the conference and exhibition in Orlando. Probably not planned from the organizers, but the main theme centered around making things easier for the users.
We can start with the magical presentation from Bloomberg, the news company. Their head of AV solutions, Jeffrey Fairbanks, shared his story on creating a new video collaboration system, aimed at all of the 15 500 employees all over the world.
“I wanted it to be one click to join a meeting: not two or three, one! No access codes or other potential hassle. With that kind of simplicity, the solution will be used, successful and better than anything already available”, stated Fairbanks.
It is now five months since Bloomberg launched the internal conferencing solution. They named it Nexi Bloomberg, even though it is based on Vidyo, and gave it the internal hype push with the help of a proper marketing campaign.
So what about the results? With the legacy system for video conferencing there were 1,7 dropped calls for every successfully connected call. Users registered 750 tickets daily related to video conferencing issues and meeting times were delayed 12 minutes on average. With the new Nexi Bloomberg it is a completely different story. Support tickets are down to 250 a day, of which 77% are install requests. Meeting start times are now two minutes on average. There are almost 15000 users of the desktop client, 1067 Nexi enabled meeting rooms and not a single person dedicated to work with video conferencing support. That is something else!
OK, so who is the “crazy passionate about user experience” person? Ciscos Rowan Trollope, of course. He appeared in my last blog post as well, but since he gave the best keynote presentation of the day in front of three packed auditoriums (two with video and audio from the main ballroom) Trollope makes it in here again.
“I have tried weightlessness in one of those Boeing 777s and was told that everyone starts laughing when they elevate from the floor where they are lying down. I didn’t really believe it and decided just to stay calm and observe. What happened? She was right, I immediately burst into laughter”, said Rowan Trollope and made a parallel to the collaboration solution that he introduced last year at Enterprise Connect. “I want the users to get the same kind of experience with Cisco Spark, a breakthrough experience.”
Rowan Trollope in the middle of his demo.
The demo is there to prove that there are more than big words in this keynote. Trollope and his team show how they have simplified joining a meeting. He walks up with his smartphone to the conference room and automatically Trollope appears on the screen. The pre booked meeting is started with one click on a button. “I want this to be a magically simple experience for your users”, said Rowan Trollope. With the next step in the demo he moves the ongoing meeting to another room. He sort of carries it to the other room with his smartphone.
The third example to support my idea of ease of use as the main theme of the second day, comes from Motorola Solutions. Simplicity was the key driver when they decided to move from a complex legacy IT environment to the Google suite of productivity and collaboration applications and telephony from Dialpad. Maybe I will tell you more about that another time.
