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Challenge

Cisco tracks everything their consumers are doing

From being present at a trade show, to downloading a white paper on the website or calling a salesperson on the phone, Cisco is tracking all interactions that their prospects and consumers have with the brand. To take advantage of all this data and make it benefit the sales, marketing and consumer experience teams, Cisco decided to create a Consumer Journey Visualization Tool. We received a pretty cryptic brief from Cisco to design such a solution by exploring diverse data visualization paradigms. Consumers activities were tracked and depending on some algorithm, consumer accounts would be placed in certain moments like “I am considering Cisco”, “I have chosen Cisco” or “I have purchase Cisco” along a consumer journey that could be described as such as awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, loyalty. The main challenge was being able to design with really little information and within a short timeline, requiring us to put ourselves in marketers and sales teams shoes to imagine what would be beneficial.

Method

Thinking outside the box

After reviewing dat visualization trends something became obvious: delitghful aesthetics and data legibility are a hard balance to find. Indeed, examples often take the shape of a beautiful-looking visual designer’s portfolio asset that is though unusable to make sense of the data it presents OR a good combination of great design and legible data to present simple information.

After some research, I sketched potential solution for the dataviz paradigm and highlighted what would make sense in terms of visualization and complemented it with wireframes. I led a small team of 2 visual designers, we started exploring options and pretty quick crafted the solution. We were inspired by an example called “A Day in the Life of Americans” and why we tried other dataviz paradigms we preferred, this one became the client’s choice.

We were surprised to see that our initial assumptions about relevant information and good representations convinced Cisco and were integrated almost as-is in the final delivery.

Consumer Journey Visualization - DataViz Ideation process

Extract 2

Other Data Visualizations Paradigms - Histogram

Extract 3

Other Data Visualizations Paradigms - DreamCatcher

Result

Consumer Journey Visualization aka known as “State Machine”