It is not an accident that this is my first blog since joining Cisco in May of last year. Although I am now an enthusiastic Facebook, Twitterer, LinkedIn group and general web site contributor, I have failed to reconnect with the art of the blog and this was mostly to do with my new world of Cisco.

Working at Cisco has changed my perspective quite significantly. I am a consultant, working exclusively with clients of Cisco rather than with the company itself. My working culture is entirely different from any I have had before I work almost everyday with virtual teams spread across the world in Bangalore, Singapore, Shanghai, Qatar, Europe, East and West Coast of the US and Canada.

At the same time the nature of my work has never been so “fuzzy”, spread across such a broad spectrum. I am grateful that my design background trained me to tread water in a deep pool of uncertainty around technical knowledge and the different businesses of our clients.

At the heart of this new experience is technology. Cisco sits at what seems the quantum level of technology. It creates the magic jumps and switching that enables us to be blasé and picky about technology interactions. Hugely useful and taken for granted things such as Google, Flickr, You Tube and iPlayer depend on the speed and smartness of the technical miracle that is the internet and Cisco have played a vital part in both building and stimulating use and application of the internet.

But although we may marvel at the iron work that holds the bridge up and gawp at the achievement of technology, we soon forget that and look at the human impact; is it beautiful, does it get us to where we want to go in a way that is comfortable and satisfying. And so with Cisco, I can marvel at what it can do but my real respect is for what we decide to do with technology and how beautifully, or not, we decide and design it’s application.

When I joined Orange I was amazed to see that I was replaying a struggle that I had first experienced as a young product designer. In carefully designing physical objects, products, the role of the designer was to consider as best one could the optimal combination of functional capability, consideration of the human in how it was used, choice of manufacturing processes and engineering details and of course beauty, visual language and form. In it’s most understandable form, design is the bringing together of both strategic and tactical elements that create something valuable and useful in the right economic framework.

In the conventional industrial product development process at that time, my design specification was handed to a mechanical engineer, with specialisms in a greater level of detail of material and process. It was a shock to then realise that the design was treated as merely a guide, where the engineer would take hold of the reigns and steer the object in whatever route made the production easier and more robust. Persuading engineering specialists of all types, mechanical, electronic, software and even procurement that the user/ customer point of view and desire was paramount and that design decisions should be around their needs, was the challenge, the same for small UK companies and global consumer electronic companies. It is only in exceptional circumstances, such as at Apple, where their leadership, investment and strategy embraces those values, that you see the full impact.

In the mobile world I saw this repeated through a culture dominated by technology and decisions and assumptions made at every level that impacted badly on the end experience of the user. The situation was worse, in that I was not in the right order of process and "design" had already happened by the time I or my team had anything to do with it. This leads to technology developed without any thought of how it would be used, or 3rd party application providers incapable of customising or improving usability.

In dealing with mobile and web design, the elements at your control are very different from designing a product. But the importance of strategy in design remains the same. At the Design Council I realised that in designing a web site that reflected the purpose and value of the Design Council, the entire organisation had to be redesigned.

But at Cisco, I see that the power and reach of the internet, although presented and designed by equally inappropriate processes and people, is at the mercy of the users and consumers in a way I've not experienced before.

From You Tube exposes of sleeping engineers, appalling service on aircraft, to Facebook communities forcing the closure of dodgy Christmas theme parks, people have harnessed the power of a collective voice influence business and politics. I dislike the pseudo democratisation that is dangerously unrepresentative and provokes situations such as Ross and Brand, but what is interesting is that companies who embrace social networking and the empowerment of the people are able to establish a new level of trust and benefit from the spread of peer recommendation.

For the last months I have also struggled to understand what to say about the mobile. It seems so exciting that millions of people can be walking round with so much technology in their pocket but find so little use for it apart from speaking and texting. Open platforms, the promise of Android, ever more capable devices failed to unlock my cynicism in the ability of the mobile to deliver useful applications to normal people. And then the iPhone 3G did it. With the opening to third party applications the ability for companies to deliver great, appropriate to their mobile context (important that bit) experiences, was finally possible. I am sure it is the end of the mobile portal, as now easy to find and use Smartphone or iPhone applications give superb experience and get the job done. Watching the data of mobile internet use go through the roof has been satisfying, as has been the broad social spectrum of iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry users which now include students, housewives and the elderly. At last, the mobile internet revolution has landed.

So for the last 7 months I have taken all these developments and developed a methodology that does three very simple things.

1. Talk about people.

It’s amazing how stumped companies are when you ask them who their customer is or governments who their citizens are. “Everyone” is an increasingly common answer, a shield to hide their lack of customer empathy behind. As ever, some companies have vast and overwhelming market research information, case studies or days in a life scenarios but even this is rarely translated into visualisations of real people. It’s a standard tool of design but creating personas that replay what starts off as data from research or insight from focus groups as believable, pinchable representations that you feel you know is very powerful and useful tool. It focuses people understanding of whom they are creating things for and helps to drive decisions around real people, away from the engineer or technical or even business perspective.

And when you look at what people do, with mobile phones, on social network sites, in music, creatively, work arounds, expectations and behaviours in other areas, new perspective can be thrown on to the overall experience.

2. Discover the customer journey.
Hardly rocket science but revealing to most people still. Because of the vertical way that companies are organised, almost nobody ever gets to experience the journey the way a customer does, travelling horizontally across the different touchpoints and business functions. The wonderful promise of marketing leads to the “out of our hands” retail experience followed by the “it’s only a box” out of box experience, the design ego of look and feel or form and the technologically challenging but without value to the customer set up options, etc, etc.

The real customer journey is always a revelation to all, from managers to chief executives alike.

3. Tell stories of how it could be;
For a designer a model, or a mock up or even a drawing, is a story telling device that lets your imagination free to visualise what this thing you want to create will be. Visualisation is very important in reaching shared understandings of what something is, showing that to real people and understanding the impact of any decision on that vision.

But I find now that I use words as drawings, and maps and plans to choreograph customer experience, built as they are on many different elements coming together in the time line of how we experience life so that we can coordinate our conversations and decisions and “design” the customer experience.

At a talk I gave last year a faithfull antagonist of mine told the audience that Customer Experience design was just a buzz term, that it was all a fad and worse still, experience should remain accidental, it was wrong to remove the delight of exploration and surprise in our life experience. This made me laugh, for the delight of discovering that the on line help page uses different terminology to the latest version of the software, that customer service agents don’t feed back customer’s problems to product development, that airports can be beautiful but are impossible to navigate around (Madrid), that user interface is designed separately to product design (Nokia et al) is no delight at all.

Of course we can design great customer experiences, it is just immeasurably more difficult to coordinate and motivate people at all levels of a company to collaborate and put individuals at the heart of what they do. But it is my job to keep trying to persuade them to do just that and for great technology companies like Cisco to provide them with the tools to do so.