Keep it simple and don’t make me think!
The “Together with VIAVI” blog series features some of the many talented, diverse, and often spirited people across the company, bringing their best to you – our customers and partners – every day. Your success is our success and we are delighted to be on this journey with you!
Name: Cyle Olson
Job Title: Web Manager
Country: USA
How long have you been with VIAVI, and what do you do here?
I have been with VIAVI for over 8 years and manage a team of front-end and back-end web developers. Our web team publishes content, translations, web enhancements, security patches, bug fixes, and performs quality assurance tests within specified sprint cycles.
We collaborate with many business units within VIAVI:
- Marketing: We support daily content updates, SEO enhancements, analytics, product releases and campaign websites.
- Creative Services: We apply created branding elements (photography, videos, banners, icons, etc.), consult in interactive platforms, and assist in website translations.
- Marketing Automation: We collaborate on lead-generating forms.
- IT: We assist in domain name registration/renewal, web security and web hosting.
Working with these teams helps us to be aware of new web trends and be at the forefront of this continual ever-changing world of technology and devices.
Describe the best part about how your role positively impacts customers and/or partners?
The best part of my role is merging brand guidelines, web trends, performance metrics, analytics and SEO best practices all into one cohesive website. I’m always looking for solutions to provide an easy, helpful, positive, and unified experience across all the websites we maintain.
Keeping it Simple
With a highly complex and diverse product portfolio that VIAVI offers, my goal is to find a way to showcase our content and product information in the simplest way possible. To make a customer’s web experience fully immersive visually, yet intuitive on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. I tend to focus on these areas:
- Simplicity: Eliminating unnecessary design elements to make the website easy to understand.
- Hierarchy: Arranging layouts so customers naturally gravitate to what’s most important.
- Navigability: Making our website navigation simple and obvious.
- Consistency: Setting and defining uniformity with the look and feel of our brand.
- Accessibility: Testing our pages so they are compatible with all modern devices.
- Conventionality: Understanding latest web trends and building elements that users are familiar with on website.
Don’t Make Me Think
The whole idea of “Don’t Make Me Think” is all about web usability. From the moment a user visits a web page, I want them to inherently know where they are at on a page. Users should not have to think about where or how to find information on a website. The quicker users can find what they are looking for, the less likelihood of them becoming frustrated and leaving the website. Let’s face it, we live in a fast-paced world with access to information at our fingertips. If we can’t find it within 30 seconds, we probably have left and moved on to the next website.
As a helpful exercise, I tend to ask myself these questions with any web enhancement or web update:
- “Does the end-user really know what this means when we present this content?”
- “Is this an internal naming convention or widely known industry term or acronym?”
- “Are there multiple pathways this user can easily access this information?”
- “Is there better way to easily digest and simplify this information?
The goal is to provide a beautifully designed website that is frictionless and understandable. To reinforce an instinctual pathway for customers to easily identify and get them to what they were expecting to find.
What do you think sets VIAVI apart from other global solutions companies?
VIAVI has such a wide and diverse set of products. For Service Providers and IT organizations, we specialize in 5G, Avionics and Aerospace, Fiber, Radio Test, Enterprise Performance/Security and Mobile Networks. We also have expertise in light management and optical coatings area in 3D Sensing, Custom Optics, Anti-Counterfeiting.
By vertically aligning in these markets, I feel we are leaders in 5G, fiber networks, network security, optical filters and security pigments. At the same time, VIAVI invests in R&D and acquisitions of key technologies/companies when necessary to stay on top of innovation. It’s great to see VIAVI expanding our technology set and product portfolio. We have a close, agile and mighty Marketing team and I’m amazed at how quickly and how much we can get accomplished each quarter.
You can read more about VIAVI Customer and Partner Champions on the “Together with VIAVI” website.
