Cisco Spark Care Product Content Design
During my tenure with Cisco Customer Contact Business Unit (CCBU), Spark Care was the product that was being newly developed in the business unit. And I got this wonderful opportunity to work on the new product end-to-end content designing from the start.
The Business Ask
- A content model that suits cloud delivery model.
- Simple, easy to access help materials.
- Well designed user interface that is seamless to use.
How my role as a Content Designer played a key role in shaping Spark Care
I played the role of a Content Strategist and Designer wherein I developed the technical content set that was required to cater to the various user personas addressed in this product – both external and internal customers.
My Approach
- I understood the new product roadmap and timelines so I could foresee what content set is required and the timelines.
- Sketched the different user personas involved in this product journey. Here I worked along with UX team to understand user research results and audience group.
- Interacted with the cross-functional teams to inspect where as a Content Designer I could be of a value add.
- Explored Context Service PaaS on top of which the product was being developed.
- Interviewed SMEs and product owner to understand the business needs and internal technical content needs.
- Performed competitor research to understand how similar product’s content model is positioned in the market.
- Explored what’s new and best practices for a cloud delivery model in the current market; introspected content authoring and publishing tools suitable for this framework.
- Collaborated with UX team to review and deliver useful and relevant UX microcopy. The approach was to influence the customer content journey touchpoint right from the product interface phase.
- Interviewed other internal content designers working on Cloud product documentation to understand what worked well, what went wrong, and learnt some best practices.
Designed Content Architecture and Deliverables
After thorough research, interviews, and understanding the deliverable timelines, I developed the following content strategy for Spark Care.
- Knowledge base articles
- What’s new
- UX microcopy and help texts within the UI
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)
- Defect fixes summary
- API documentation
- Internal system architecture wiki docs
New Tools and Process for Continuous Delivery Model
- Jive – Since the business approach was more towards community forum to publish technical content and have active interaction, likes, comments from users, Jive best suit the business need. I developed the Jive expertise and served as the point of contact for mentoring peers to publish and manage content on Jive.
- Topic based authoring in Xmetal – Although the tool was used across for all technical content generation, the standalone, small topics catering to the knowledge base article style was new to this content model. I worked on delivering these KB articles that were simple, easy to consume content for customers without any information load and easy to find relevant information topics.
- Github – With SDET model and CI/CD pipelines for code, it was a good learning curve to use developer tools and I learnt basics of GitHub to push, merge, and pull in code for API documentation purposes.
- Agile 2.0 – I initiated the process to review UX microcopy before the user story was set for development. All UI screens were reviewed and feedback was provided before these user stories were made available for development in the upcoming sprint. Being involved in backlog grooming, sprint ceremonies, and product strategy meetings and providing valuable inputs for product development.
- Customer demo – At the end of every sprint, the content designed and doc deliverables were demoed to customers.
Note: The product was launched successfully and all the designed content set was published on Cisco Jive. However, the Spark Care end of life was as of 2018 and supporting content is no longer publicly available.
Cisco Spark Care is the now Cisco Webex Teams Contact Center.
Authored Tech Content
Here are some of the TechDocs work samples that I have authored at Cisco Spark Care which is now revamped as Cisco Webex Contact Center.