Establishing a content research practice to help simplify Cisco licensing

I was content lead on a project to build a new all-inclusive licensing portal that was intended to simplify the Cisco licensing experience by providing one place to manage licenses (rather than the current mishmash of 7 portals, each offering different actions) and offering a clear, simple, user-friendly interface. The previous portals had had very little input from product designers and no content designers had ever worked on them. For more on my role more generally in building the new portal, see [link].

Ensuring that the terminology used in the new portal is clear, accurate, and familiar to users was both a high priority communicated by leadership and something that was clearly important from looking at the old portals and user feedback on them. This was particularly important due to the highly technical nature of many of the actions described in the portal and the complexity of the associated vocabulary.

Improving the clarity and consistency of the terminology proved easier said than done though. It was easy to identify terms that might not be clear enough, or that were used inconsistently, but aligning with stakeholders on which term to use going forward was difficult and time-consuming. Part of the challenge was that in some cases different terms were used in the different licensing portals we were absorbing, and different SMEs and directors argued aggressively for different choices based largely on which portals their team had built. In some cases one term was used consistently throughout, but it was potentially confusing, and SMEs often argued for keeping it anyway. Attempts to create systems for gaining alignment were not terribly successful due to territorial disputes, and there was very little in the way of relevant research studies to draw on.

As a result, even though we were putting a lot of effort into trying to make the terminology as clear, consistent, and familiar to our users as possible, we still weren’t hitting all of our heuristic targets. We were also wasting a lot of time with unproductive terminology discussions. I realized that we needed targeted content research and a data-based approach to change hearts and minds.