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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technorati: web experience iplayer bbc

I confess. I'm over 40 and I like facebook. I have a twitter account. I'm linked in. I have my space. I participate and share. I must also confess I sign up for and contribute to these things because I feel I have to. I'm compelled to understand what is going on in these social networks, so that I can be better informed and not miss something in my customer experience work. At least, that's my excuse.

Actually that's nonsense. I'm compelled to do it because I can't help it. I've got so much drivel to share that I have to put it somewhere - and one day I might get on a 'hot drivel' list somewhere. I'm a classic 'me too.0' casualty. I only really exist in these places to been seen by other people that exist in these places. Occasionally we'll find a common interest or I'll surprise myself by saying something vaguely professional and someone will ask me about it, but in general, I'm just out there. Which is fine. On my own, I'm pretty inconsequential, but collectively, whether it's blogging, digging, flickring, or some other noun-to-verb activity, there is a collective consciousness and audience/publisher shift like never before.

All of which pontificating brings me onto the interesting snippets. One of the places I participate because I actually want to is flickr. I would say its at creaking point right now, but if you're not obsessed with being interesting, its still one of the best places to interact and share your own stuff with like-minded people. Its success, for me, lies in the fact that its about something specific - photo sharing - rather than a place you can go and do, or share, pretty much anything, without any real focus, other than what you think is interesting yourself, like, um, facebook, twitter, myspace. I was contacted yesterday by a flickr user (which sounds rather like a dependency, which, of course, it is), who is publishing a book. The book is being published via lulu, using an ongoing set of montages made up of photos from other flickr users (we huddle around burning oil cans under bridges), which are used as 'mashups' with quotes and comments on the changing face of online, media and communications. Its not-for-profit and all contributors are covered by creative commons licensing and clearly credited/attributed. The book was just put together because lots of people liked the images and said 'can I get these in a book?'. And now you can.

Isn't that great? I think so - and I'd normally slap this kind of thing with the cynical fish as soon as even acknowledge it. Simple, honest and now, facilitated by social media.

Tunes: The Pigeon Detectives: Take Her Back

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 flickr Social-media

Martin just sent me this amusing video about the current 'tragic internet crash'.

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

The Onion never ceases to delight me. Thanks for sharing Martin.

Second in the series on Web 2.0, this segment continues the discussion about community.

Tip: use the icons in the lower right hand corner of the screen to add your own comments and tags to the video (Viddler account required).

I recently gave a talk on Web 2.0 to the Sun team responsible for the My Sun Connection portal, and Martin liked it and suggested that I share this with you.

This is the first in a series -- note that I used screenshots and images gathered on the Web, and all copyrights belong to the respective owners.

In between Blu Cantrell and Holly Valance on The Hits channel this morning, as I was hopelessly pounding a treadmill watching bits of me move in opposite directions, I saw a TV advert that I'd seen a few times before, but I wasn't sure what it was. If you're in the UK, its the one with cogs and springs and bits of watches falling out of the sky. I'd never seen it with the sound on, or to the end, so I had no idea what it was all about, until today, when a Vodafone logo appeared and then they boldly pronounce the 'The internet is now mobile' (their capitalisation).

I thought about that in the shower and seemed to remember that the Internet has been mobile for years. I remember having a mobile strategy for sun.com at least 5 years ago (which was, admittedly, a few loosely connected options held together with string). I also remember building sites for AvantGo, using their strange mobile language in about 2001. Heck, my old Sharp GX10 was able to trawl pretty much any site once I connected via GPRS, so what's different now?

The main difference appears to be the availability of mobile versions of the most popular sites out there. Which is turn, neatly packages up into an 'Internet service' - Vodafone Mobile Internet - for the network carrier. So Vodafone can now sell 'the Internet' to pay-as-you go or monthly contract customers because there's something to see, which of course there always was, but now its done properly. Not surprisingly, the mobile sites they feature as incentives to prospective customers include YouTube, Windows Live Hotmail, MySpace and Amazon (plus the BBC and Rightmove for the slightly older and aspirational types).

While none of this is a bad thing, of course, and most network suppliers are doing something similar, I was just intrigued by the reinvention of something that was already there, as a piece of marketing. Its an obvious catch, really, as nobody really understands the Internet on their mobile phone ('it says connect to Internet, but asks me to use WAP. what's WAP?'. 'Is this it? All I can see is a logo? What do you mean, scroll down? Oh, hang on, it's stoppped doing anything - it says "unsuppported type", what does that mean? etc.), so why not re-launch it?

Anyway, I rather like their little demonstration of how this new mobile Internet might be useful to you while you're trapped on a London street corner (Vodafone Street, W1 - funny).

Tunes: Robert Pollard: Hammer In Your Eyes

Technorati Tags: Mobile Internet Marketing

I've noticed a proliferation of Basecamp instances in my life recently. Basecamp is a project management web app that really does a good job of facilitating diverse location collaboration and project progress and tracking. We use it on the sun.com User Experience team and many vendors we work with also use it but it's different-different un/password, different url, etc. This creates complexity in the User Experience of interfacing with Basecamp. The problem for me has always been, what do I do with more than one Basecamp? I have to access more than one so it's been a set of bookmarks I've had to manually keep. But today they announced and released a fix to this issue. They tie the accounts together through OpenID, so you also need an OpenID account to make it work. (this is an excerpt from the blog post about the new feature that brings all the Basecamps together) Open Bar "If you have multiple Basecamp accounts, and you use your OpenID to log into each account, you’ll see a thin black bar at the top of the screen. We’re calling this the “Open Bar.”...The black Open Bar lists all your OpenID-enabled Basecamp accounts."

Nothing to do with earnest deliberations on corporate customer experiences, but Motion City Soundtrack are at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on July 7th. I just thought Martin (I wish I could link his name to something) might like to know. If he's back in Colorado, they're also playing the Marquee in Denver on July 14th. I'll have to wait until October 4th until they play near me in the UK.

However, it will be a toss up between that and going to see Send More Paramedics, which looks like it might possibly be the best night out a person can have for seven of your British pounds. I mean, there's nothing I like more on a quiet Thursday than having a relaxing evening meal with my wife and children and talking about school, work and the weather, and then popping out for a couple of pints of Stella Artois and a hour of zombiecore surrounded by teenage b-movie extras.

I know can hear some people out there saying that those two activities are actually pretty much the same thing in their house...

I did love my old Mistubishi Diamond Pro CRT monitor. There's something about bouncing electrons about in an infinitely variable way (I know that's probably not what is happening) at any resolution you like, when you're scraping your laser mouse around, a pixel at a time, to fill a corner in a drop shadow on an E4 widget for a presentation. I did like the colours of that monitor. I did like the fluid, ghost-free, crisp redraw you got when you ejected from a Eurofighter in the Battlefield 2 expansion pack. I did like the 4 port USB hub in the side of it.

It was, however, enormous, of course. I mean, I have a huge desk in my office, but that monitor had a footprint like a Brontosaurus. So when I had the chance to swap it out for an LCD, I was keen, but kind of wary. But I needn't have worried. The LCD on offer in this case was a Sun 24.1 inch flat panel monitor. That's a 1920x1200, 2.3 million pixels resolution, 16ms (12ms gray-gray) response time, HD/HDTV-ready, +/- 89 degrees viewing angle, 0.27mm pixel pitch, ultra-fast, motion-enhanced, 24.1 inch flat panel monitor.

I couldn't get the Mitsubishi off the desk quick enough (save for a couple of near-hernias) and get the new monitor up and running. I thought I might have a whole bunch of calibration to do and have inf files all over the place that I was supposed to do something with, but no. I just plugged this thing in, hooked up the graphics card and that was it. Perfectly clear, bright, and colour-rich screen, which, if I got really close to, like I end up when I'm photo-editing, I couldn't even see the edges of.

Its been on my desk for a couple of months now and not a flicker or a pixel out of place. I've had to rearrange all my desktop environments, of course, with so much space on offer. What that means is that I can have a Go Live workspace on one side of the screen and Firefox on the other. They don't even overlap. I can also pretty much view 1600x1200 images at 100% in Photoshop without any scrolling around working out where I've overdone it with the levels on a huge picture of someone's eye.

Its also rather good at running, say, Half Life 2 at 1920x1200 with everything on, but that's not the kind of thing I might do while I'm supposed to be putting together a presentation on customer touchpoint journeys for a meeting on Thursday.

Tunes: Datarock: Laurie

We dedicate enormous amounts of effort to getting our web launches out on time, and very, very nice they are too. But how do you get that message out to the rest of the world? We operate in more than 100 countries around the globe and even though over 60% of sun.com traffic is from outside North America, our local country sun.com venues are the trusted advisors for the local markets. If we have a story to tell, we need to tell our customers and partners in France, Brazil, Hong Kong, Kazhakstan (yes, Andy, Kazhakstan), Portugal - in fact, everywhere we are, which is everywhere. We also need to tell them in a language they can understand - their own.

What we'd like to tell you (and so would would virtually all corporate web organizations) is that we have a rather splendid global web content platform that automates the whole localization and deployment process, without any manual steps, transparent to end-users. Well, we do have one of those, in fact, and very, very nice that is too. Its not, however, quite 'hands-off' as yet. Many of the components that enable us to build dynamic web content, and share that content across multiple venues and countries, are actually managed and deployed by that system. We've centralized the management of a number of global components and we're making progress every day towards efficient global deployments. But we're not there yet.

In the meantime, and for about the last 10 years, we've had a centralized team of expert web publishers that oversee the entire release cycle for content that appears on our country venues. It started small at first (as an IT function, no less), with a few country marketing teams buying into the service, which was actually free at that time (ah, the late 90s). By about 1999/2000, we were part of the core marketing function and had an operating model that was pretty efficient, with around 10 countries on board. I was managing that team by then and had great plans for it. Which didn't really come to much. However, the team was then taken on by Simon Bardrick, based in the U.K. He quickly took things to a much higher level, to the point were now, his Global Web Publishing team is a fully integrated, globalization-ready and globally distributed organization. They provide design, deployment and localization services to support the local marketing teams, and they've been very successful at managing the deployments of our key messages to our worldwide sites.

Take a quick look at the latest web launch on sun.com. The Global Web Publishing team had 32 country web sites live, with launch home pages and supporting features, in local language, all within 15 minutes of sun.com going live. This is all transparent to our customers, of course, but knowing how this all works in the inside, I can tell you, its awesome stuff. One day we'll automate Simon out of a job, but as long as he keeps raising the bar so high...

Tunes: Genesis: Supper's Ready

Web globalization is a 'fingertip on the cliff' profession - as long as you can maintain the slightest interest, you may just move forward an inch. If you follow John Yunker or any other of the growing number of web globalization evangelists, you'll know that the last five years have seen lots of progress, and there's some fine examples of how you can get things just right as a start-up, or with a new operating model.

In most cases, however, the single most prohibitive factor in successfully deploying a coherent globalization strategy is history. Its not about what you want to put out there, its about what you've already got out there. Really, defining a globalization strategy is easy - even I can do it - and we've had one at Sun for about the last 10 years. The real issue is that back in 1995, anyone, anywhere in Sun, who had either technical know-how, or lots of cash (there was plenty of both in 1995), could set up their own Sun-branded web site.

At that time, regional control of the web was in the hands of the region, and so it was the cash in the local field marketing organizations that set up the corporate sites for the UK, France, Brazil, China, Poland, Japan and so on. It made sense. Nobody knows the local business like the local business teams, and anyway, there wasn't any money coming from 'corporate' to do this stuff - sun.com was busily inventing itself, thank you.

Fast forward to 2007 and we're still dealing with this legacy. Things have improved considerably, of course, with great work in centralization of our core web publishing team for the regions, development of our globalization-ready publishing platform for sun.com, our superlative design framework and other efforts, but we still have the 'gazillion web sites' problem. Each country site begat its multiple satellite sites, then its event sites, then its bizarre business development and SME sites. We also have our sun.com partner and child sites and associated stores, shops, and consumer venues all over the place. Without a seismic shift in business process and agreement on content strategy, its very difficult to overlay a neat little diagram of a global web platform.

Which is where Dave comes in. Dave is our supremely committed web globalization producer, working out of the Broomfield, CO office. Unfortunately for Dave, he's inherited my web globalization pitch (it's not changed for 7 years, and I inherited it from my previous manager and Martin) and he is currently developing it and taking it to the deployment phase. Everyone is our organization knows it's the right thing to do. The executive management have grasped the nettle. Many folks actively evangelize web globalization and won't work on anything now without asking 'but how does this work in China?'. So be nice to Dave. He has the hardest job in customer experience right now.

Tunes: CSS: Patins

It's almost the end of May and Martin's riding a Segway at a Cisco.com team outing!

But what will happen to Martin's Blog, you ask? He explained it earlier, but I'll recap for those of you that missed the news. Martin is off to another adventure in his career at Cisco.

One of his wishes was that his readers not be left abandoned. He started this blog with a vision of it being about Web Design and Usability. We've got a whole team behind these topics at Sun and one of his departing wishes was that we continue to blog about these topics and that even more of us participate so hopefully the content will be that much more frequent. (not better, Martin is a pro, you know. ;) )

So, I'd like to say thank you to Martin for what he leaves behind here at Sun. He built a great Web Experience Design team. I'm lucky to be part of that team. He felt we were strong and that he could leave us behind to continue to do great things here at Sun as he takes on a new opportunity. But what he has taught us stays with us as we forge ahead. We can ensure that the spirit of Martin's leadership is part of our DNA. Martin's optimism, vision, expert knowledge and curiosity will continue to inspire us.

We should remember what Martin always challenged us to do in our work, design the best experience for the customer first. Even if it wasn't always achievable, it was always encouraging us to reach and push for something better for our customers. I for one will keep pushing, you taught me that. :)

The next step is to get the team blogging. I'll do my best to keep our readers up-to-date on Web Design topics at Sun and I'll encourage all of my colleagues to lend their voice to the discussion.

I hope we can continue to interest readers and continue the Web Design and Usability blog tradition.

Thanks for the memories.

p.s. It's highly likely that Martin will show up on this blog from time to time and he is planning to blog at Cisco so you can continue to follow him, I know I will. :)

Our friend Gwen just won [a slot in the lineup on] the TV Guide America's Next Producer show. Yay!!



Technorati Tags: Reality TV

One thing about blogs as a communication medium is that they are organized chronologically rather than by topic.  Tag clouds help, but don't give much context.  So, as a public service I am creating this posting to organize some of our Sun.com wisdom. This is mostly stuff from me, and inspired by our design team at Sun.com. So it's not a compendium of all web design and customer experience wisdom, just our wisdom. Enjoy!

Design Process Soup to Nuts

We've had a number of postings about our design process, and in driving a new design from end to end. There's a lot more that could be written but here are some favorites so far:

Checklist: Before Your Start a Big Web Project - Things to keep in mind before you start a big new project.

Pretty Good Example of a Strategic Brief - An example of a complete brief for a project, describing design goals and business goals.
 
Web Designs: Locking Down Visual Designs - How to lock down visual designs once the IA is done.

Tigger, Pooh, and Judy Jetson Meet Wireframes & IA - How web pages get "painted" just like old animated cartoons (well, kind of).

Opteron Pages as a Design Lesson - A point-by-point recount of the process we used to design our nicely visual, tabbed product pages (including customer interviews, usability testing, information architecture work and content mapping, photography approaches, visual design work, and more.)

Managing Design

Top 10 Tips to Averting Bad Web Experiences - Some wisdom about common issues that affect the customer experience online. And, we added an extra tip later.

Managing Big Web Design Projects - Our process (roughly) for managing big web projects.

Communication & Storytelling

An important part of the design process is communicating designs with customers and internally in your company. At Sun, we use flow diagrams, storyboards, and, recently, online comics to tell the story of how customers will use our designs, and we've shared our templates. Here are some postings about the topic of comics in design:

Examples of Comics in Design - How comics can be used to illustrate and give a human face to stories that otherwise would be hard to tell as flat storyboards. And see More Comics in Design for more examples.

How Customers Can Help You Develop Concepts via Comics - Notes from YAHOO!'s team about how they use comics in customer design sessions to have customers help design.

Templates and examples:

• Design Comics 0.9
• A Comic Storyboard in PDF
• Design Comics Templates 1.0
• Comments on Comics 1.0
• Design Comics Templates 1.01
• More Comic Templates: Phone Conversations

Measuring The Experience

Beyond usability testing and survey feedback, one way we measure how we're doing is by analyzing site metrics. Here are a couple of classic posts on the topic of using web metrics to improve the customer experience:

Shameless Direct Marketing Tools Can Improve Customer Experiences - How conversion rates and other simple metrics can show you where you may have a customer experience problem.

Conversionomics - How basic math works in conversion funnels.

Browser Views Getting Wider - An example of how site metrics can yield useful information to a design team.

I Wish We Just Sold Socks - A colleague's reflections on the complexity of measuring metrics along complex buying cycles.

P.S. We've actually developed some simple tools to overlay what we're seeing in metrics onto related data from tests and other customer feedback. More to come.

Keeping Sites Clean & Organized

A problem all big sites have is that content gets out of date.  We're relentless in cleaning things up, but it's still a huge job. Here are some posts with tips on how to stay on top of things.

Stale Web Content Sniffed Out by Pet Dog - How a page devoted to a pet dog helps us gauge the relative importance of other site sections.

PANOLA and the Chuvo Test - A methodology for purging "PAges NObody Looks At."

Web Site Purges & Pharaoh's Chisel - When purges go too far, confusion ensues.

Launching Things

Design is only a third or less of the battle. Getting things developed and launched is at least as much of a challenge.

The Secret of Launching Things - How a "launch sequence" spreadsheet and other tricks can keep things running like clockwork even for complex launches.

Even on the Web, Deadlines Matter - Reflections on how the instant nature of the web breeds a myth that deadlines don't exist, even when they do.

Designing With a Distributed Team

Our design team is almost 100% remote from corporate campuses and from one another. We're distributed in multiple states and countries, and take price in being able to communicate and work almost around the clock.  I'm a strong advocate of Sun's "OpenWork" program, which allows employees to work in offices on campus or at home, and it has helped us work well with vendors and employees distributed in lots of different locations.

Designing From Anywhere: Lessons from Mad Magazine - Some lessons about designing in a distributed team, which we also do at Sun.

Designing From Anywhere: What People Like - Things our team particularly likes about the Open Work program.

Designing from Anywhere: Pitfalls - Things that are harder with work from home or remote collaboration.

Designing From Anywhere: Best Practices - Best practices for remote collaboration and working from home, distilled from our group.

Visualizing Our Home Offices - Some pictures of our home work environments.

Managers, Do You Need Your Offices? Managers tend to cling to their offices, but should they?

Information Architecture

Zen & The Art of Content Mapping - Home to do a content make in prep for a new design.

What's a Wireframe? - An explanation of what wireframes are for, and how to use them in a design process.

Solutionless Puzzle: The Dreaded "S" Word - Some topics have ambiguous names ("labels" are what we call them in IA parlance) that everyone still uses.

Why is this Page in Latin? - A little bit about Loreum Ipsum.

Design Practices

Why We Share Our Design Philosophy - Notes about our component system and design philosophy and why we post them on the web.

Segments, Profiles, Personas - Tools to communicate the personalities and lifestyles of your customers internally. And see also: Great New Book on Personas.

Worst Practice: Click Here - Why "Click Here" as a link label doesn't work very well.

Data Models: Hey Don't Get Me Started - Sometimes technical underpinnings deeply affect the user experience.

Where Your Eyes Travel on a Page - Interesting results from eye-tracking studies.

Commentary on Other Spaces

Disneyland: Designer Debris, Trash Talk

Starbucks in Customer Experience Lines

BBC, Sun.com, and World Usability Day

Podcast: BBC.com Futures

Tufte Story: Answerbook

Flickr Conceptual Model

Voting as a User Experience

Why Doritos is So Brilliant


There are a whole bunch of topics I didn't include here, which were about specific improvements and redesigns to our Sun web sites -- I will these up separately some time. And I can see there are a lot of topics missing about the discipline of designing for the customer... so stay tuned for more of these in the coming year!

Tunes: 43: Fortress: Pinback

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience