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

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.

 

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!

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 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. :)

Yesterday the new Sun Blogs home page was released.

It was really interesting to see all the live feedback coming in from the Sun blogging community. I've been part of teams redesigning web pages for many years. It's always interesting to find out what reactions are to the new design post launch. Even though some feedback was less than positive (that always happens by the way) it was absolutely a healthy discussion. We got some excellent feedback and even released a revision on the same day. YAY for iteration and attentive engineers and designers.

Now it's time to get some feedback from you, dear readers. Tell us what you think about the new Sun Blogs home page, that's what the comments are here for, we want to know what you think.

Wrapping up the discussion on Web 2.0 with thoughts on user experiences — what makes a site compelling, fun, and dynamic, and worth repeat visits?

I hope you've enjoyed the talk — if you have oodles of time and can't get enough of Web 2.0, here is the full length, un-cut version.

Also, I'm providing the presentation in PDF and PowerPoint formats. Please feel free to mash it up with your own words and images.

Third in the series on Web 2.0, this segment touches on technology and architecture.

One of our biggest challenges on sun.com (or any of our venues) is how we bridge the gap between customers and sales. Traditionally, supporting a customer journey that starts on the web and ends up at a real, living, breathing sales advisor is something like building a rope bridge over the Grand Canyon. Without a rope. Increasingly, however, the expectation on any consumer site, be it selling blade systems or Dolce & Gabbana, is that there should be an option to speak with somebody, immediately, right at the point you need help or have questions you don't see the answers to (or just don't have time to look). I often refer to this option as an 'escape route' on a customer journey, but in reality, there's much more value in providing that option than just a way to help a customer when they get stuck. Its one of our primary customer touchpoints, and we're just starting to understand the value to our customers as we increase the availability of these services across our sites.

A little over a year ago, we launched chat, call back and toll-free services on limited sections of sun.com, without fanfare, or champagne, in order to connect customers directly with expert sales advisors. You may have come across our small widgets on sun.com, or some of our country sites and online stores and catalogues. You may have also been invited to participate in a chat or call by some of the rather clever technology deployed on the site. Either way, behind the scenes, there was a huge customer experience challenge to pull multiple component parts together to ensure the customer journey was as consistent and transparent as possible, but I think we're doing pretty well so far.

We continue to improve the availability and scope of the services (you can talk to a sales advisor during business hours, Monday to Friday, anywhere in the world) and are beginning to get much better at integrating the services into our core content. Most recently, we've embedded the service provision into our web launch pages, so if you have questions, need advice, or simply want to know more about what's being talked about, you can access a real, living, breathing sales advisor directly from the launch site. No hunting around for a contact number for a local sales office. Want to have a quick chat instead? In French? Its right there. Oh, and the advisors are really nice people to talk to. Why not try for yourself?

Tunes: AC Acoustics: I, Messiah, Am Jailer

As a design team, we continue to try to think about how to integrate community content into the sun.com web site. You can read about our communities producer, Lou, in the recent post from Tim about the Customer Journey Producers on our team.

Apparently the blog-o-sphere is noticing. The really nice thing about these posts is that they are from non Sun perspectives. When you are 'on the inside' you can never be sure if the way in which you put things out there is resonating with the people you want to reach. You test and you plan and you do everything possible in your practicioners tool kit, but for people to say so, that's when it's fun.

Two blog posts about our community activity have been recently located.

This one is about our Perspectives pages on our products.
Products pages with Customer Perspectives >>>

This post is about Sun blogging and it's benefits.
Blogging "turns communication upside down" >>>

Gee, over the last three years of blogs.sun.com's existence, I've blogged about all kinds of design-related topics, including...

• How to design for conversion
• How we do user-centered Web design at Sun
• The importance of well-crafted data (yawn) architectures for web sites
• The importance of (yawn) web deadlines
• How to visualize multidimensional VOC data simply
• Our customer product ratings, our new home page designs
• How we sniff out stale content
• Detailed discussions of redesigning our product sections

Plus dancing cows and lorem ipsum.

And yet, what's the most popular stuff? It's Comics, Trash Cans, and Gas Pumps!

Design Comics have been a very popular topic on this blog, so much so that I started the DesignComics.org site so that this blog wouldn't overrun with comic storyboards.  That's great, since comic storyboarding is a legimimate design technique that many companies are using, but I wish topics about business objectives, user goals, usability plans, launch readiness criteria, and data (yawn) models got just as much traction.

Galina 1.0	Pravin 1.0	Mary 1.0

Trash Cans at Disneyland was another very popular topic on this blog. It's a chronicle of practical design of trash cans at Disneyland (which did win me an internal Sun "Bloggie" award, but who's counting?)  OK, good design technique in here: How to make some obvious but blend in at the same time.

Sampling:


And Gas Prices in Southern California. This doesn't have anything to do with Web design, and yet is this blog's all-time winner, beating Jonathan Schwarz's blog for a time. And the picture also ended up on the front page of USA Today!



Happy third birthday, blogs.sun.com!

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Tunes: 43: Hourcast: Stillwater

A nice mention of our comics templates on Google Blogoscoped. Also, some alternative comic-making tools in the comments include:

• stripcreator.com (Web Site)
• Comic Life (Mac)
• Comic Book Creator (PC)
• Microsoft Photo Story

Some of these aren't great for design comic and storyboarding purposes, but they're interesting to look at.

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Tunes: Steely Dan: King of the World

I've added initial source files (zipped JPEGs, PNGs, Illustrator) to the DesignComics.org site. Just go to the Source Files section.



Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Tunes: 73: Tony Bennett: Some Other Time

Here's a neat story about use of our design comics to reduce the number of internal support problems at a university:

http://ialja.blogspot.com/2007/02/when-words-are-not-enough.html

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

OK, rather than blog incessantly about design comics at the expense of other topics, I set up a new web site devoted to the comics, called DesignComics.org:



Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Tunes: Frank Sinatra: Luck Be a Lady

If you would like to collaborate on developing new scenes or characters, or have other ideas about how to improve the design comics collection, please do leave a comment here.

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Here are some more characters from comics slides set:

Betty 1.0	Joe 1.0	Ellen 1.0

Like the others, they're in StarOffice format.  See my previous file format notes for more info or get StarOffice or OpenOffice.

You can use these characters and scenes in storyboards, presentations and brainstorming during product development; they're free for you to use under a Creative Commons Public Domain license. We do ask that you include a short credit in your finished work (see the slides), but other than that we encourage you to get creative and use them however you like as a base for graphic storytelling in your company or organization. If you enjoy them or have additional ideas, please post a comment to this blog.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Tunes: Beatles: Eleanor Rigby

Heres the next in our series of comic storyboard templates.  Meet AnaLi:



Here are some examples of scenes and poses:



You can download AnaLi 1.0 templates now. Like the others, they're in StarOffice format.  See my previous file format notes for more info or get StarOffice or OpenOffice.


You can use these characters and scenes in storyboards, presentations and brainstorming during product development; they're free for you to use under a Creative Commons Public Domain license. We do ask that you include a short credit in your finished work (see the slides), but other than that we encourage you to get creative and use them however you like as a base for graphic storytelling in your company or organization. If you enjoy them or have additional ideas, please post a comment to this blog.

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Tunes: 43: El Guapo: Buildables

Heres the next in our series of comic storyboard templates.  Meet Miguel:



Though he started out in our persona modeling as as "support agent," Miguel now often plays a role of the "concerned marketing guy" in our internal comics. That is, we intersperse scenes and insets of him to show what company headquarters is thinking about various experiences that users are having on the site.

Here are some examples of scenes and poses:



You can download Miguel 1.0 templates now. Like the others, they're in StarOffice format.  See my previous file format notes for more info or get StarOffice or OpenOffice.


You can use these characters and scenes in storyboards, presentations and brainstorming during product development; they're free for you to use under a Creative Commons Public Domain license. We do ask that you include a short credit in your finished work (see the slides), but other than that we encourage you to get creative and use them however you like as a base for graphic storytelling in your company or organization. If you enjoy them or have additional ideas, please post a comment to this blog.

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Tunes: 43: Connor: Cold Feelings

Even with supposedly 100% online web experiences, customers sometimes need to actually talk to somebody on the phone. So, here are some additional scenes to complement the comic storyboard designs I recently posted. These new scenes are of people conversing by phone. For example:

As usual, these are in StarOffice/Open Document format. You can use these characters and scenes in storyboards, presentations and brainstorming during product development; they're free for you to use.

I do ask that you include a short credit as a courtesy in your finished work (see the slides), but other than that we encourage you to get creative and use them however you like as a base for graphic storytelling in your company or organization. If you enjoy them or have additional ideas, please post a comment to this blog.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain License.


Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics Tunes: 43: Sunny Day Real Estate: In Circles

Thanks to all who provided comments and well wishes to my Comics 1.0, Part 1 templates.  A few replies back to you...

• Thanks to Kingsley for posting PowerPoint versions. I work primarily in StarOffice so I'll keep posting originals in .odp and other open formats, but I know PPT is convenient for many people.
• Good suggestion from Leslie on posting zipped JPEGs and PNG files.  I will do this once we have a final complete set of images. (I have all the JPEGs and PNGs loaded into my StarOffice Gallery and I have to admit it's quite convenient to drag the pictures from the gallery right into the slide. Also, you could use these images in Comic Life or other apps.)
• On Calum's suggestion to provide OmniGraffle palettes... let me get to the final versions and also a zip of JPEGs. Then we (or someone interested) could definitely look at this.

Cheers!

P.S. More postings to come this coming week.

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Remember those comic storyboard examples I posted a while ago?  I also promised I would post complete slides with characters and scenes as they became available. The first batch is ready, so here they are:

Galina 1.0	Pravin 1.0	Mary 1.0

You can use these characters and scenes in storyboards, presentations and brainstorming during product development; they're free for you to use. I do ask that you include a short credit in your finished work (see the slides), but other than that we encourage you to get creative and use them however you like as a base for graphic storytelling in your company or organization. If you enjoy them or have additional ideas, please post a comment to this blog.

About the Scenes

The scenes here were developed to illustrate use of web sites and computer products, but you could use them as a foundation for telling a user-centered for almost any product. Here's an example of what the range of images looks like:



Why comics? Telling a product story in a graphic style -- using characters as part of thr story -- helps people inside your company understand realistically how their products will be used. More important, graphic narratives offer a glimpse at potential issues that customers will encounter when using and getting support for your products or services. Here's an example of a storyboard using one of the characters (the same storyboard example linked to above):



More Info on the Slides

Format: The slides above are in Open Document Presentation format. To use them, download one of the following: StarOffice (the affordable office productivity application from Sun), OpenOffice (a free version of the office productivity application for Solaris, Linux, and Windows), and NeoOffice (a free version available for the Mac).

Credits: The concept for these templates originated here at Sun, and the illustrations were done by ISD Group, a small design company based in the Ukraine. The original ideas were inspired by an early comic storyboard set we did in the 1990s for Sun's Answerbook product, as well as Kevin Cheng's and Jane Jao's recent talks on using comics in the design process.

Future versions: These are early 1.0 versions of expressions and scenes for a few characters. Stay tuned for additional characters and scenes which are still in development. By the way, if you like this format and need additional scenes developed, you can certainly develop your own to add to the mix, or contact ISD Group and they can likely develop new scenes or even new characters in vector or JPEG formats (originals are done in Adobe Illustrator, in case you're curious, and then we convert to JPEGs and PNGs).

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics

Tunes: 43: Esque: Hard Living

A couple of people have noted that the comicbook design storyboard example I recently posted is in an Open Document format not supported (yet) by their MS Office software.  Well, OK...

My first advice is to go download StarOffice or OpenOffice (or NeoOffice if you have a Mac).

But if you want a sneak preview, here's a PDF version of the comicbook file you can download.

And a thumbnail view of the first few panels:



Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics


Tunes: 43: Sondre Lerche: Track You Down

Here's how we're progressing on our project to create Comic-based storyboard templates for web designs. I've put together an example comic book storyboard using StarOffice slides and telling the story of buying ballet tickets from an imaginary web site (actually a real site but I changed the name to protect the guilty).  If you don't already have it, you can download StarOffice or OpenOffice to view and edit the slides.

Slides are a good format because you can print them out and post them on a wall and mark them up, and also share them electronically with colleagues and customers. 

The slides here illustrate one good use of comic storyboards, which is to inject a human element into a design story and thereby show the user experiences more compellingly whether they are good or bad. Other applications include using characters and scenes up front to assist in your design thinking, and testing concepts with customers (see my previous posting). In our spare time, we're developing several characters and scene sets like these to tell stories and help with our design of web experiences on the Sun.com sites.

P.S. Here are some scenes from the storyboard above.













P.P.S. Previous postings on this topic:

• How Customers Can Help You Develop Concepts via Comics
• Examples of Comics in Designing Customer Experiences

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics