Cisco.com User Experience Guidelines and Standards

The best model for developing a portal on CDC today is a self-governance model. Teams that choose to implement a portal and/or develop and use portlets are responsible for ensuring that their portal and the portlets within it meet the standards of other existing CDC portals.

Historically, internal Cisco developer support for a common Jetspeed Portal technology existed. However, this internal support no longer exists., and since no Portal framework or common code standards exist, it is the responsibility of each group who require a portal or have the need to integrate portlets within multiple portals to use the best practices and guidelines outlined here to ensure the user experience is optimal.

The Cisco.com User Experience team is discussing a longer term strategy where the user experience and interaction design standards can be technology agnostic, and where a single instance of a Cisco portal customizable with users’ views has many advantages over the current practice of individual business units providing disparate portals.

Disparate portals require their own maintenance and support staff, and tend to segment visitors who may value the cross-pollination effects of a single common portal instance.

What is a Portal?

A portal is an aggregation of various Cisco applications, tools, and processes into a single, standardized framework. Central to its value is the ability to support personalized and customizable views. Each user or user group can tailor both the content and the appearance of the portal to suit their preferences and requirements. Through the elimination of multiple decentralized visits to different locations, portals improve user productivity with quick, centralized access to important information, data, tools, and applications (Dudhoria, et al., 2003).

What is a Portlet?

A portlet is a "mini" application that represents a portion of a larger parent application or tool that the user can customize. Usually, it is not designed to fully replicate the functionality of complex applications or tools; rather it displays the most important and commonly-used information, data, content, and functionality. As a result, it is limited in display and acts as a shortcut entry point to its respective parent application or tool. A portlet needs to be designed in concert with the core application to ensure a successful, congruent user experience (Dudhoria, 2003). A portlet also can exist independently of the parent application if its contents are relevant to the user and they choose to include it within their own view of data.

Existing Portals on Cisco.com

Each of these portals currently serves Cisco customers and partners in different ways. Although each uses the Jetspeed Portal Architecture none of them are fully integrated to share an instance of the server. Channel Partner View and My Technical Support may soon be able to share portlets across pages (as of this writing, 29 Mar 2005).

For further information about Portals, send an email to ask-ue@cisco.com.