Introducing New Green Tech
on a Global Stage

As part of its new drive to reduce the environmental footprints of the company and its customers, Cisco launched a key initiative to develop “Futureware,” an application that monitors and controls building energy consumption. Futureware was set to be introduced at the Worldwide Energy Summit in Barcelona, and while the application itself was not complete, Cisco’s CEO planned to demonstrate the product’s features and capabilities to thousands of attendees in an on-stage presentation.

With the summit rapidly approaching, the company still lacked one vital component of this plan: the Futureware demo prototype. Given the urgent and technically complex challenge at hand, they turned to Filter for help.

To meet these ambitions, the company engaged Filter to bring additional UX research and design services in-house as part of a centralized creative studio that in turn supports product teams responsible for internal apps. Filter had been engaged by this client in the past, and they valued Filter’s ability to provide an embedded team who could quickly get up to speed – proven experts who could get right to work with minimal onboarding or ramp-up time.

Filter also brought an informed partner’s perspective on how to mitigate risk stemming from the unpredictable workload demands from various internal clients; the need to integrate not only with their own teams but also with other outside consulting groups; their desire to drive overall process improvements and efficiencies for the creative studio organization; and space constraints at their HQ location just outside Seattle.

Collaborating with Cisco’s team to gain a deep understanding of Futureware’s goals and features, Filter worked at full speed to deliver application development, UX design and modeling, and complex storytelling through multiple form factors. Our team of UX experts, visual designers, and developers designed the prototype’s user interface, built interactions that enabled it to function in a realistic manner, and created scripts to demonstrate the application’s key features and benefits. They used agile methodology to support the iterative development of the demo prototype.

Filter completed the entire prototype in 30 days, with ample time for testing and rehearsal. The prototype was easy for both the stage manager and Cisco CEO John Chambers to control, and it effectively synchronized with the live stage setting.

At the Worldwide Energy Summit, the prototype successfully showcased the application’s features and capabilities in a realistic manner, garnering an extremely positive reception from both Cisco stakeholders and conference attendees. To this day, Filter continues to produce Cisco’s executive demos and presentations.