Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

If you're still reading this, we're very flattered, but it's actually moved over here. If you're not reading this at all, and its just a rolling subscription, subscribe to this instead.

Regards, the sun.com design team.

We're moving. As the contributors to this ex-personal kind-of-team blog drop like flies, well, a couple of flies, we're looking at a new home for our web experience postings which is more, well, like a proper home. It was nice of Martin to let us stay here after he moved off to pastures new, but we need something a little more bijou. Maybe a couple of extra rooms. Something we can decorate ourselves and maybe put a couple of pictures on the wall without the landlord moaning about nails. We probably need a garage. Oh, and I want one of those claw-feet baths. etc.

If you are actually reading this, not just subscribed via google reader without ever getting around to it, and if you would really like to continue with us, you should update your bookmarks, feeds, readers, subscriptions, favorites, post-it notes, newsgroup entries, whatever you do, and point to our new Web Experience Design blog - we won't be posting any new content here. We'd be delighted if you would come and join us. We don't have anything salvaged from a marketing cupboard in Menlo Park to offer as an incentive, but I will personally drink far too much tonight if you make the switch. What more could you need?

Hopefully we can continue to maintain a level of interest somewhere just above plateau and that you'll get something out of reading the new posts. I have a personal goal to enlist the creative writing skills of at least 5 other team members with various expert insights into what we're doing on sun.com and associated sites, so that it doesn't turn into some kind of rambling nonsense devoid of any grammatical constructs that might make it even readable let alone enjoyable to anyone who might just alight on it from some kind of not-so-hot blogs listing aggregated from spambots at the top of google search results for 'blog' even though some of you like that kind of thing.

I should have a voracious appetite for consuming competitive web design and researching Nielsen/Nelson/Nickleback usability 101s. How could I possibly do my job properly if I'm not informed about every subtle design nuance or web porn monetization strategy? In reality, my approach seems to have more in common with some kind morose, laconic, insular rock/pop group - "We don't, like, listen to other bands. They're all sh...".

I can only list about three web sites that I visit on a daily basis. One of those is Google Reader, so, from a pure design perspective, I'm not even going to count it (harsh, but fair). Which leaves me with two. One of those is just a terrible customer experience anyway, but it sell tickets to concerts where I live, so I don't care. Which leaves me with Facebook, which I only look at daily to see how unpopular I am, and is overrun with vampires. So really, I don't much look at any web sites these days. Is that a terrible admission? I just got bored of looking at stuff for the sake of it some time ago. I'm not one of those hunched-back, dribbling ex-engineers who delights in telling anybody who cares that I was designing web sites for NCSA Mosaic before anyone had even decided the Internet was just a fad(sm). But I was. Of course, back then it was pretty much just seeing what you could make blink with the blink tag, but it was customer experience design, nonetheless.

Fast forward fourteen years, and a lot of design has flashed before me (literally 'flashed' in many cases). Some of it went in, some of it didn't. Lots of it was rubbish, some of it was fantastic (I successfully unleashed a whole bunch of stuff categorized as the former). In many cases, the customer experience was truly innovative and inspirational to folks like me, just trying to understand customer experience as a design paradigm, so I thank whoever came up with those ideas. However, these days, when I'm immersed in a design problem, trying to map a customer journey, or support a customer interaction through design, I'm clearing my mind of the last fourteen years of clutter. I'm trying to reach customer experience nirvana and I can only do that if I reach a point where I know all that I have experienced online, am currently experiencing online and will experience online - my customer experience karma.

That's all nonsense, of course. As soon as Alex sends me a link to Robot Chicken Star Wars or something, I'll be off for a couple of hours, going "Whoa, that's so cool!". I'm easily distracted. The point is, it's often quite possible to design a customer experience that isn't a result of modifying an existing one. Innovate. It is wise to check out the competition, of course, but why try and leverage the best bits of their terrible experience? You should use the standards you have to drive the visual elements, but if there just isn't a standard for what you need, there isn't one - don't crowbar it into a component that was designed for an altogether different class of behaviour. If everybody does it that way, it might be that that's the best way - why would everybody do it that way otherwise? I'm hoping I don't even have to address that one on a Sun blog.

Technorati: customer experience web-design

Tunes: Rakes: Guilt

There is already a kind of disquieting feeling on conference calls about information architecture packages and product suites. Its not so much what's being discussed, as who is discussing it. You see, since yesterday, we are without the angel-on-your-shoulder that is/was our chief Information Architect, Jennifer Bohmbach, and everything seems a bit, well, undetermined. I expect we'll muddle through on gateway designs and aligning solutions concepts with product finding. We might take a good guess at how we categorize our software portfolio in terms of business need and link that back to our core category framework. Someone might even be foolish enough, I mean, clever enough, to take on contextual country/language selection (what do you mean, that's mine? I told you, no more globalization!). But really, it won't be the same.

There's no doubt our loss will be Minnesota's gain and we all wish her and her enormous brain the best in her future endeavours. If eatongolden.com isn't completely re-organized to maximize your potential around social media by next Thursday, I'll eat somebody's hat.

Good luck Jennifer. It was a pleasure.

Tunes: Radiohead: Everything In Its Right Place

You might know exactly what you're looking for, or you might not really know at all. You might have been told to find something because the one you've already got is suddenly under a cloud of smoke, or you maybe never had one at all. You might even just think you should get one because you read somewhere that you should. You might just have thought that the title of this post was a bit like 'Finding Nemo' and so you've not actually read this far, because it reminded you that you wanted to book to see Ratatouille at the cinema and you've now gone somewhere else.

In any case, if you're just setting off on your journey down the road marked 'product', hoping to be directed to your final destination by some kind of virtual sat nav that knows exactly where you're heading, even if you don't, then you're in for a frustrating ride. The truth is, even though companies like Sun have been trying to steer customers via the web to the products they need to solve their business problems for years, we're still not very good at it. We're better than we were, but we're still not very good. It's not just Sun. Most of our competitors are pretty rubbish at it too. If you're lucky enough to be looking for a specific product that falls into the 'we found loads of money and got a vendor to design a matrix for our entire product line of 3 products and then build a microsite' category, then your task might be relatively straightforward. But suppose you want another product. One that's a bit like the one you just got, but a bit different, say, like buying storage for your servers. Should be simple right? But wait, this microsite looks completely different, and there's no navigation at all, oh, hang on, there it is, oh, no it isn't, and, hey, there's hundreds of these things, which one do I need? They're all called the same thing, what's that all about?

This can be even more frustrating if you actually know what you want and you think you know where you can find it. You might have pretty well-defined selection criteria for your product. It has to have 2 of these, be that big, cost less than that and run this, that and the other. Lemme at 'em. What do mean I can't filter? I have to look at every single product in this product line and read all the data? I mean, like, compare it myself? Look, these products don't even list that data. That's the most important thing! Oh, forget it.

I'm painting a pretty woeful picture to illustrate the point, of course, but the fundamental issue remains - trying to find products to suit your need can be a difficult task. At this point, it would usual for me to tell you that we're working on a fantastic new architecture for product finding on the web, driven by customer needs and supported by a redesigned data framework, that would allow us to categorize, subcategorize, filter and compare across entire product lines, with current pricing and compelling reasons to buy, linked in with all the latest deals. Well, we are. I'll let you know how it goes, and you can let me know if it works.

Tunes: We Are Scientists: This Scene Is Dead

Last week I had the fortune of participating in the Open Source @ Sun Summit hosted by Simon Phipps, our illustrious chief open source officer. The people in the room are Sun's unsung heroes, putting in the long hours building community and committing the code to bring us the cool applications we use everyday (GNOME, Glassfish) and probably take for granted. It was a humbling experience.

Here are some of the memes that stuck:

1. Most people don't want to pay for software (and that's perfectly OK).
   The best software is free — a benefit not lost on developing countries, students and educators, and people like you and me. Putting technology into the hands of many leads to economic opportunity for all, since people bring their favorite open source apps into the workplace.
2. Convenience = revenue.
   There is a reason why people flock to the simple, powerful and elegant — they value their time, and will regard companies that satisfy needs with the least pain involved. Unbuntu, anyone?
3. Sun actively participates in many externally hosted communities.
   And, those projects end up in products like the Java Desktop System.
4. Most open source developers work for a corporation.
   Proof that open-source is a viable business model, beside building good will with the community.
5. "Any community is only as good as its people."
   Glynn Foster nailed it. Beyond coding brilliance, soft skills count for a lot, too. The most successful projects always have a person tirelessly emailing, settling differences, and exercising diplomacy with the community.
6. Never control, always influence.
   Everyone likes to be treated fairly. Consensus-building and diplomacy count as much code contributions, and are qualities demonstrated by the most successful project leaders.
7. "If you don't invest in community management, there will be no community."
   Bless you, Simon Phipps. Now I just need to convince a few of our stakeholders of the same.
8. Mojo Rising!
   Do people flock to your company site to download the latest software release, and tell their friends about it? Congratulations, you have karma. So hard to build, yet so easy to lose, it's the quality that companies dream about and lust after.
9. Why Can't We All Get Along?
   Even with most honorable and sincere intentions, agreements and licenses meant to protect the spirit of openness and freedom of open source are twisted by the crafty few, at the expense of all. May the GPL prevail!
10. "Innovation Happens Elsewhere."
    Enough said.

A while ago, I stamped my feet like a child and demanded an enormous flat-screen monitor to draw pictures on, and lo, one appeared on my desk. If I run anything at less than 1920x1200 now, it just feels like I'm looking at a Commodore 64. This has been perfect for a number of design projects and is also rather nice when you fill the enormous screen with Team Fortress 2 and pick off a few engineers. However, the system that powers this huge screen is my own, and although it does the job very nicely, it's sometimes difficult to manage the overlap of home and work projects on one machine - especially when the whole family has an account on there.

Although I have a splendid work-supplied laptop, I've been been waiting for Sun's official work-from-home hardware for a long time. The laptop supports my job very well, but it isn't always the best thing to work with when you're sat at the same desk day after day, thinking you want, say, a proper screen and a keyboard that works with real fingers. So, imagine my delight when a dubious delivery company phoned me on my mobile phone to ask me which direction they needed to drive in to get to my house, because they had something from, erm, 'sunlight', or something, for me, on the back of the van. Could this really be the fabled Sun Ray @ Home system of which I've heard people speak? It's sighting is something akin to spotting a lion in your wardrobe, but Dave from DGL Deliveries says he's got one for me.

You can't really believe how easy this thing is to set up. It is one of the 'misconfigured' units that needs something done to it, apparently, but all I did was plug it in, stick an ethernet cable in it, and it asked me to log in to the Sun network. No network configuration, no service pack, no drivers, no multiple reboots. In fact, it was a total letdown. I was looking forward to spending a couple of hours tinkering around with router tables, NAT, dongles, ports, installs, uninstalls, etc., but no. It just works. After about 3 minutes, I had Thunderbird, Firefox and everything else I need to do my job, which was unfortunate, as I then had to do my job, but you see my point - this was almost zero installation time, out of the box to full-functioning.

Notwithstanding the fact that I was already impressed, I forgot about the pièce de résistance. I haven't used my Sun ID badge in earnest since I visited the Colorado office in February, and I didn't even know where is was (can I say that?), but this Sun Ray 270 has a slot in the front. Yes, a slot. Where you put a card. Where I put my Sun badge and it knows who I am. Isn't that exciting? So, after I locate my badge in the pocket of the jacket I only ever wear in America, I slip it out of its plastic holder and gingerly slide it into the central orifice. Well, blow me if the slot doesn't just light up like Christmas, and the screen says hello to me, using my name. Well, my Sun ID number, but it's the same thing to me. I'm looking forward to taking it out of that slot one day, flying back to Colorado, using that card to access the building, and locating a Sun Ray and putting that same card in, and that same session I left back in my home office in the UK suddenly springing back into life, just as I left it. That's how it happens. It's been like that for years at Sun, but its still a novelty.

The Sun Ray 270 also supports the laptop as a stand-alone and very nice monitor, of course, so everything's coming together at last.

Tunes: Radiohead: Bodysnatchers

We live and work in an environment that requires collaboration.

There are very few things people can do alone these days, especially as design workers. We need to show things to each other, to stakeholders, to customers. Everyone needs to be involved at some level and at some point.

I have a colleague who was interviewed about her Information Architecture & Usability team at the last Information Architecture Summit. She conducts the interview with one of the members of her team. I like that she is a shining example of collaboration-even in the interview. Livia and Austin talk frankly about how their team is successful working within their company.

The interviewer, Christina Wodtke, sums up their top line items for success:

If you are a member of an internal IA, UX, User Experience, Usabilty, Design Research, User Research, etc. team you should keep these principles in mind:

1) learn the language
2) dress better
3) lose the agenda
4) be a resource

Simple and straightforward advice for success.

Listen to the interview >>>

In much the same way as I watch multimedia through my fingers, until I find out there's stuff out there which is actually ok, I approach virtual tours with some apprehension. I'm not talking about the virtual tours I'm compelled to watch to see how dreadful someone else's décor is when I'm looking for houses I can't afford in the nicer parts of town, but the virtual tours that you might happen upon when you're quietly browsing around a corporate site looking for information on 4-way sockets or large black boxes. In general, these are very turgid affairs, with unfathomable navigation systems and hideously clunky video inserts which wouldn't look out of place on public access TV. However, there are occasionally some great examples of how these things can really communicate an idea, tell a story, or simply give an insight into a someone else's world.

Although I think its been available for a while, the Sun Labs Virtual Tour is one of those examples, and it manages to do all of those things. Notwithstanding the fact that the URL ends in .htm, which still gives me hives, the whole package is effortlessly slick and, dare I say, kind of exciting, with all that whooshing and clunking going on. The bit I really enjoyed though was the representation of the rooms that the esteemed Sun Labs folks reside in while they're exercising their enormous brains. You get to poke around and look at the clutter on their desks - complete with steaming cups of coffee and faux iPhones - and while you're there, there's a nice collection of video, effortlessly embedded into the environment. I spent about an hour in there this morning and didn't get bored once. I watched Paul Lamere's stuff twice.

Tunes: At The Drive-In: Cosmonaut

Technorati: multimedia customer experience web-design

As part of the customer touchpoint program we're working on right now, we have a goal to deliver a set of guidelines that define the program policies, deployment and operational guidelines, terminology, brand direction, and so on. We should really call it a playbook, in line with various other corporate, erm, playbooks that we follow here at Sun, but our program manager feels a bit sick every time I say that word, so they are to be guidelines.

At present, they are just a framework and a table of contents, with names next to the major sections - the people we think might actually write the thing for us - so in a kind of transient state. They really began life as a diagram of a phone tree and evolved from there. I'm sure the diagram was done on StarOffice Draw, but it might have equally been done with Visio or something similar. However, as we've determined the scope of the document (for it is still a document right now) and decided there needs to be a whole organization's worth of input, rather than just a diagram, its become a StarOffice Writer file. Which is fine. Except its not very interesting, of course. I mean, I can put the odd picture in there and ramp up the brand interface, but really, its just a text file. I had thought I might follow the style of the lovely brand identity guidelines that our splendid brand group puts together, but I'm not sure I can really work out what format it is (although it is published as a pdf). Its a beautifully constructed piece of work - concise, clear and direct - but I suspect its been developed on Quark or some super desktop publishing system by a super design agency over the course of 3 years, whereas I have 2 months and a budget of nil.

The real question I should be asking is who will be expected to follow these guidelines and what will work best for them? Its unlikely that if I present a 60 page StarOffice Writer file (even if I save it as a pdf with pictures in) that anyone will get past page 3 before they start flicking to the point that's relevant to just their daily operations. The trouble is, it's all the stuff on pages 3-10 that we really want them to understand. So, we're currently conducting interviews with our customer touchpoint community - representatives from around Sun who are really at the front line of customer interactions - to see just what they do right now, and what might work best for them in the future. We're not just asking about guidelines and standards - there's a whole other set of questions we don't know the answers to - but a key part of the interviews is to try and determine what best practices are already out there and what previous work has been done in this area.

It was in one of these interviews that it struck me that I was doing it all wrong. Not that the content of the guidelines is necessarily wrong, but that the way we are trying to present it and have it serve as an accessible resource just might be. And it was obvious what I should do instead. So today, I am.

Tunes: The Enemy: Had Enough

Technorati: technical writing staroffice

The latest Techcrunch event, Techcrunch 40, is shining a spotlight on start-up companies that are all about enabling people to work together toward common goals. The power of the network is being leveraged to teach, to track investements, design electronic products and so much more.

Manifestations of wikinomics are popping up everywhere. This is about, "collaboration on an astronomical scale" according to chapter 11 in the Wikinomics playbook.

There is more room for an idea to take root than ever before. Each person can contribute more quickly and easily. Maybe we can all just get along, at least on the network. ;) The benefits are clear, sharing=winning. I knew that Sesame Street cooperation training I had when I was young was going to come in handy.

One of our biggest goals - and challenges - for this year comes in the shape of simplifying and enhancing our 'customer touchpoints'. Broadly speaking, what this refers to is all the access points through which our customers come into contact with Sun. Those access points can be obliquely physical (if that's possible), like the packaging on our products that get delivered to your door. They can describe an experience that is defined by a set of (mostly internal) processes, such as how you feel when you order five products and they come in five boxes, when they could have easily fit into one, or having to install your optional memory upgrade - which was delivered separately - yourself. More often than not, however, these access points are defined by those places our customers find themselves when they are interacting directly with us, either by phone, web, e-mail or any other communication channel (of which there are more than I can neatly fit onto one my my slides). Its this last category that is currently making the brains in our team hurt.

In order to map out a 'best possible' customer experience across those multiple channels, we're trying to determine the structure of a channel-neutral information architecture. Our reasoning behind this is pretty simple. We can probably go after each channel in turn and create a new phone tree, a new web hierarchy, a new customer feedback system, and so on, and map those back to our internal departments. The trouble is, that doesn't address the underlying inconsistencies and is unlikely to excite either our external or internal stakeholders ('let me get this straight, you've moved technical support under "post sales" and now we have to change all our internal numbers because customers now press '4' and not '3'?"). What we have to do is understand the key customer journeys that we need to support for those interactive touchpoints, and build out a taxonomy based on that. Its not about pressing pound for sales advisors, or tabbed web interfaces, or even the right kind of fax headers. Its about customer tasks. What are the expectations for a customer wanting to talk to someone about enterprise software licensing and how do we exceed those expectations? What is the most effective entry point for a journey that ends with "thanks, that's just what I wanted to know about Java training in Minnesota" (which, incidentally, you can find in our training section). What, in fact are customers trying to contact us about? Now, that's the real question, of course.

A large part of the task will involve understanding just what we already do, so that we can be pragmatic about change (not boiling the ocean etc.). We do a lot, and some of it works great, some of it doesn't. Some of it might even be hijacked and redirect you to unexpectedly mature content (I think we caught all those already). In any case, there's a whole world of touchpoints out there, and somehow they need to map back to a channel neutral information architecture, so that we can overlay our developing standards and guidelines, ensure quality and consistency, and manage change. Which reminds me - I'm supposed to writing a presentation on all this, but I'm stuck on a catchy nomenclature which describes a customer task focused touchpoint information architecture. I'm thinking 'touchonomy'. Jennifer might like that.

Tunes: I'm From Barcelona: Chicken Pox

Technorati: information architecture customer experience

The results are in! We asked for your help designing the wikis.sun.com home page, and your favorite features include tabbed navigation, community, What's Hot and Recent Labels (Tags).

Interestingly, while over three hundred and fifty of you attempted the survey, only ten surveys were actually completed. Lesson learned: the ranking widget may work for managing Blockbuster Online rental queues, but it is a poor choice for a quick survey.

Thanks all the same for your participation, and we look forward to incorporating your input in planning future releases of wikis.sun.com.

Many of my years at Sun were spent pounding away at the keyboard in relative isolation, writing technical documentation for what sometimes felt like an invisible audience. Fast forward to 2007 — my, how things have changed!

This video tells the story about how publishing has evolved at Sun. I was inspired by the release of wikis.sun.com, and I hope you enjoy it. Big thanks to our resident video wunderkind Danny Holland for the long hours he spent producing and tweaking the video.

I'm not usually that enamored with multimedia presentations on the web, as they are usually, frankly, rubbish, and interrupt my Editors cd with a sudden whoosh of electronic fanfare that I wasn't expecting. It was with some trepidation then, that decided to 'Take the Tour' of Sun's Energy Efficient Datacenter, whilst on a whistlestop design tour of sun.com. The eco innovation initiative launch page itself is worth the entrance fee, and is bursting with info, which is neatly compartmentalized using the wonderous css overlays that Andrew developed, so I was quietly confident about anything that launches from that page.

As it turns out, its one of the best 'tours' I've taken online recently. The design consistency and alignment with sun.com and Sun's branding was good (not sure about a couple of the fonts) and the little things were right; the progress bars, the glyphs, rounded corners (naturally). What I really liked though, was the Sun staff talking to you directly, all neatly set up against the white background, with their own little shadows following their movements on the 'floor'.

Some of the segments took an age to load, and I'm sure someone can point to a design rule on opposing gradients in the template, but overall, this is a rather nice implementation. I also learned a bunch of stuff about Sun's eco innovation initiative which I didn't know before (which wasn't much), which is nice. Give it a go yourself at the eco innovation initiative launch page on sun.com.

Tunes: Midlake: Roscoe

Technorati: web design multimedia eco

wikis.sun.com is all about openness, peering, and sharing, and in the spirit of community, we'd like to invite you to help us decide new features for the home page.

We'll run the survey for a week, provide the results to you, and use the data to guide us in our planning.

If you don't see a feature listed that you think is important, please let us know by adding a comment.

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing from you!

Depending on who you represent, social networking at work is either an evil time-sink or an essential part of the home/life balance. At present, in the UK at least, these conflicting views are generating an interesting debate between those who represent employers and those who represent employees. Well, I say interesting debate, but its more of a wet-fish slapping contest at the moment, with each side saying the other is talking 'nonsense'. In reality, its a perennial debate - how much of your life outside work should your employer allow you to have inside work, especially if it utilises corporate resources and prods the acceptable boundaries of corporate policies?

Social networking does both, of course, but not really to any greater extent than just shopping for handbags on Amazon, or using your company-paid cellphone to spend half an hour every day talking to your bookie (not that I do). I know the business conduct and privacy concerns are legitimate for most employers, but they should probably be more concerned about employees brains turning to gravy after an hour on Facebook or bebo. At least they're not down the pub downing pints of Carlsberg with vodka chasers - nobody seems to do that anymore.

The real truth is, as Brendan Barber of the TUC points out, that too many employers just don't understand what on earth their employees are doing with these networks. The enabling technology is simple - its just the Internet, right? - but its the Lord of the Flies-like perception of these social interactions that is sending many corporate employers rushing to the panic button. You can't blame them. What they do know about social networking is that you can set up a group on Facebook called 'My Employer is a dick and should be spanked' and invite the whole of the workforce to join, until its so big that the Daily Mail simply have to print a story about it, or that so many people are checking their friends pages on MySpace at lunchtime that the Internet literally melts somewhere. Its time-wasting, pure and simple. That's the reason Kent County Council banned 32,000 employees from using Facebook.

Thankfully, at Sun, we've had full, open access to the Internet for all employees since year zero, and we're actively encouraged to express opinions and push boundaries. We're huge in the community space, and really, you can't understand it unless you're part of it, so we're not about to restrict usage of social networks or get heavy-handed on policy. From Jonathan downwards, we're as open as it gets, and that's the key - our open culture. Sun trusts and respects its employees and invests in them the responsibility to do the right thing. Sure, we have policies to protect Sun from improper conduct, privacy issues, copyright and trademark infringements, and so on, but I can say, without question, we'll never have one which states "you can't use facebook/linkedin/bebo/myspace/twitter/etc on company time and that's that". That would be 'nonsense'.

Bootnote: Facebook vs. HSBC. HSBC (one of largest banking institutions in the world) graciously concedes to U-turn on student banking charges, following Facebook campaign to boycott the bank. This will be in the Daily Mail tomorrow, naturally.

Tunes: Charlotte Hatherley: I Want You To Know

Technorati: social networking facebook employment

And if you don't like the idea of dwelling underwater, you can always set up camp on the roof.

I try to learn something new every day. Today StumbleUpon showed me that the innovation of people to dwell on earth in unique and interesting ways is endless.

"The main aim of the project is to allow anyone to live in a unique environment through a self-sufficient, nonpolluting dwelling that exists in unison with their ocean surrounding," Zema tells POPULAR MECHANICS. At first glance, the Trilobis looks as if it would be more at home soaring into the sky than plying the waters of atolls, bays and maritime parks. Looking at a computer image of the bow conjures up visions of the flying saucers in 1950s science fiction films. The Trilobis's blueprints, however, reveal a nautical heritage that reaches back to the humble dugout while simultaneously embracing 21st century technologies that include high-strength composites and nonpolluting hydrogen fuels."

You've got to see it to believe it.

I recently moved to a new group in the .Sun organization, and to help educate my new team, I prepared a diagram showing many popular Sun communities. I ran out of room and didn't include Open Solaris, Java.net, OpenSPARC.net, and few others, so my apologies in advance to those teams.

My team found it helpful, and I hope you do too!

In an attempt to classify/categorize myself based on the proliferation of the little bits of drivel that live out in googleland, I've been attempting to separate out the professional and unprofessional. Its an information architecture exercise that really only requires two sticky notes on a whiteboard. A selfonomy, if you will.

For the most part, its a simple exercise to throw your user-generated content into one of two buckets; ok for my employer (or another employer, or my aunt who has just discovered google) to read, and things you do in your spare time when you're pretending to be younger/cooler/more interesting than you really are. In other words, loosely, professional and unprofessional. You can choose your own buckets, but this is my starting point.

There are some places that live in both buckets, and, interestingly, hop from one to another over time. In order to let people determine my credentials, I'm simply referring them to profiles I've already created out there in social networks, so, for 'professional', I'm linking to LinkedIn, and for 'unprofessional', I'm linking to Facebook. However, I'm not entirely convinced its such an easy mapping, and I'm pondering whether to switch things around. As Curtis mentions, increasingly, the Facebook generation (I'm sure that's a registered collective noun or something) are moving towards LinkedIn as the place to be seen, the place to raise a profile. Conversely, withered old professionals like me, especially in the internet industries, are moving toward Facebook as the place to create social and professional networks with their peers. I don't know why that is. Perhaps when you hit thirty-five you are compelled to turn people into zombies or show how much like someone else you are, based on the ranking of ten videos you don't even like.

In the end, empoyers and employees will probably all miss each other, and it'll be like some horrible web 2.0 party where all the employers are being childish in the kitchen, while the prospective employees are sitting quietly in the living room, waiting for someone to ask them to dance. I suspect it may not actually be like that, because most people who have a profile in one have a profile in the other, but the real question is, which one would you want an employer to read? The one with the resume, or the one which might actually say something about you?

Actually, it doesn't matter, because you've probably got your name all over at least three other sites where you are twittering nonsense all day, so it doesn't take long to peel back any veneer of respectability you might have crafted for yourself, to see what you're really like. Which is precisely why I'm going through this exercise, although I know I'll end up throwing a misjudged satirical parody in the 'professional' bucket by mistake and I'll be hoist by my own petard, as usual. You're not reading this are you, auntie?

Tunes: The Twang: Either Way

Technorati: social networking facebook

Cool Idea: Wireframes with Active Code

It is a set of Indesign documents and objects that allow for the rapid building of anything found in the online style guide. Extreme Wireframing is how I like to think of it.

We had a release of the InDesign Template System in early June and even since then the value keeps increasing. Publishers request the highly detailed documentation, the library of site sections documented continues to grow through the hard work and partnership of EightShapes (who also built the system). Other vendors we work with like OIC and Hot Studio are able to utilize our design system and build with these tools. They've done some interesting things to inform the tools as well. Having a tool like this has also made it clear where partner vendors could try to push the style guide in meaningful ways. It's hard for team members to come in from the outside and build on the system, but this documentation system makes it relatively quick to get up to speed.

We are slowly extending the usage of the tool to more designers. We are also going to be moving some of our documentation for commerce into this system so those pieces will be there to leverage in the future.

It's really key to document the system so that content creators don't have to continue to reinvent the wheel. It creates a single documentation language-the style guide- for our work. That's no small thing and it feels like we are getting closer and closer.

Creating this tool for designing experiences on sun.com has simplified communication. We still have some work to do but we're seeing results. There is too much content to be able to address each piece in a custom manner. This allows more attention to the differences.

Until this documentation is complete, we are, as my esteemed colleague Chris H. says, 'negotiating the gaps'. It's a really interesting puzzle from a design perspective. It's also not short term. The team has worked on the core of the system for years. Andrew P. has a really good story about that.

I'm sure there will be more to the template story as well as the overall styleguide. I'll continue to keep the blog updated as our progress moves us along, hopefully I can get others to chime in as well.

I want to give a shout out to the Software Experience Group at Sun as they have just kicked off a new blog. The first post is an interview with the groups leader, Anant Kartik Mithal, who is the Director of xDesign about the blog and what kind of content you can expect.

From Kartik in the interview, "We hope to share with our readers a bunch of interesting problems that Sun is trying to solve. A lot of our stuff is open source so people can follow along as it shows up and comment if interested. Sun is all about making our customers more successful and more productive. And design is all about supporting that."

If you read this blog, this new blog is probably of interest to you.

And to our colleagues in xDesign, your web design peers salute you! Happy Blogging, we'll be reading. :)

I've developed a habit of being at least 6 months behind web 2.0. This is less to do with not knowing what's going on - I have plenty of people around me like Lou, Jennifer and Danny who are on top of all this stuff - but more to do with being willfully ignorant. I've set myself some kind of perverse challenge to distance myself from the very customer experience shifts that are happening all around me and that should figure significantly in my work. I try to convince myself that its like being in a band that's not obviously influenced by others ('we don't listen to other bands, modern music is all crap'), but I suspect its more to do with being over 35 and having no friends, which makes 90% of social networking pretty hard work.

By the time I've signed up for anything, its usually on the sine wave trough of coolness and most subscribers have moved on. It doesn't have to be a social networking site, however. I'm just as good at ignoring subscription and on-demand services - I've never downloaded a free mp3 or a movie in my life - so I thought it might be an informative exercise to check up on the BBC iPlayer to see what that experience might be like. The BBC News site is one of only 5 sites that I will visit every day, and have done for the past 10 years or so, without ever really being disappointed by it, so anything new from them is worth looking into.

Another one of my web experience contradictions is that I rarely use search on a web site to find something on that web site. I'll use google (other search engines are available) to find a site in the first place, but when I'm there, I have endless faith in the usability design and information architecture experts that have invested their time and flexed their minds on trying to understand the customer experience on that site, and the probable customer journeys. Many times I'll get what I want with ease, either because the site is so small, its all there in front of you, or because the design really does support the task I need to accomplish, and what I need to do at each stage is obvious to me. Other times, its just luck, of course, or my task happens to coincide with a press release or feature story. But sometimes I'm confounded, when I don't think I should be.

As I write this, I've just found the iPlayer and signed up for the beta, which will probably expire before they get my request, but it was not an easy find. Even if you don't daily visit the BBC News site, or The Register, or Slashdot or wherever you go, you might have heard about the iPlayer. Its been on the networked TV news many times this last week, so even if you don't know your AIX from your Ubuntu, you probably know its about watching telly on your computer. You might expect that with such a high media profile, it would be obvious where to get it. But it wasn't. I mean, you start at bbc.co.uk alright, but notwithstanding my aversion to site searches, there's nothing on the home page to tell you where to find it. It might be under 'TV'. But it's not. It might be under, erm, 'Entertainment'. But it's not. I'll try a programme and see if there's links from there. Any programme. 'The Real Hustle' looks as good as any. There's links to clips, let's see what happens there - oh, it's the BBC3 player and I don't have Real Player G2. I thought I did. Anyway. Let try going via the News site. Nothing there, hang on, let's try technology news. Aha! An iPlayer story. Quick, go there. There, in the 'Related BBC Links' section are all the iPlayer links I need, including the iPlayer page itself and the press release, neither of which actually contain links to the sign-up page.

As it turns out, the iPlayer page is actually found via Home > About the BBC > TV, radio and online > BBC channels > Television > BBC iPlayer. I can relate to this entirely. We have an About Sun section on sun.com and the sun.com worldwide sites, which was, for a long time, like the foster home for unparented content. In other words, it was the publishing teams, not the business owners, who decided what went in there. 'About Company X' is often the place to start first if you're not really sure, as many loose ends get tied together there. I'm sure I've just missed the home page feature links and stories that get me directly to the iPlayer. I was probably a few months late. If I'd used the site search, I would have got there in a flash, but I was being awkward, so I might just get what I deserved. However, I usually read 'awkward' as 'naive' or 'new'. I've watched my family and other newer internet users exhibit this behaviour. If they can't click to it, they won't get there, and before you say 'A-Z Index', its not in there either.

This isn't really a grumble, its an observation regarding a specific item on a specific site, but it mildly annoyed me on a Monday morning. I'll just add it to the small list of customer experience annoyances in my head. I think finally finding it and then seeing that the logo is a dubious flickresque concoction annoyed me more.

Tunes: Kings of Leon: McFearless

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