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

You can imagine we make a lot of changes to Sun.com every year. We keep internal blogs and write-ups about these changes, which I was looking over this week. Here are a few highlights.

1. Turbo-charged Search

It was our obsessive mission last year to markedly improve search on the Sun web sites, so you can get the answers you need online quickly. (This is the cute internal logo we gave the search improvement project last year, which we dubbed "OneSearch."  )

Planning for this project started a couple of years ago when we were horrified to learn from online surveys that search was the #1 top-of-mind dissatisfier on sun.com (this means that when people were asked unaided what things needed the most improvement, search always bubbled to the top. yikes). In talking with colleagues at other big commercial sites, I've been surprised to learn that all are in a similar boat:  And vexingly, our sun.com visitors and my colleagues' visitors expect local sites searches to be much better than than those at Google, Yahoo, MSN and other services... reasoning naturally that we should know our content best for our sites and be able to deliver great search results.

Sun.com is making progress here. After lots and lots of usability testing, surveys, customer interviews, detailed query analysis, and poring over our content, in January of 2004 we quietly rolled out a new search system that (1) searches across all relevant sun.com documents on all key Sun web sites and (2) categorizes the search results into tabbed categories so you can browse through results more meaningfully.

We fine-tuned this search all through the year.  Lots of the changes we made had to do with content and indexs, but we also made a host of UI changes. For instance, at right is a picture of the original tab system, which, based on further usability testing, we later tweaked into the current beveled tabs.

We also added intelligence for the support spaces, with a new SunSolve search that's now in Early Access.  And after a brief hiatus, illustrated "best bet" entries made a return, with convenience links that go to key sub-pages (try searching for Solaris or Opteron, for instance).

The search work is paying off... as the year progressed, we found that search had moved from being the premier top-of-mind complaint in our online surveys down to a distant fourth, and reported satisfaction and search successes are way up as well. We're continuing to refine and improve search on the Sun sites, and in the new year I'm planning to post some blog entries about our experiences.

2. New Software and Downloads 'Gateways"

Another thing we did to make things easier to find is to create a new tabbed top-level page for Software.

The page offers a tabbed categorization of software, which organized by "System," "Category," or "Products A-Z." So, if you don't know that the Access Manager identity product is part of Java Enterprise System, you can also find it listed by category under "identity" or under the A-Z index.

We made similar improvements to the popular downloads gateway page.

Many of you helped us create this new design through your participation in usability tests and surveys.

3. Some New Product Page Designs

We've gotten a lot of comments about what you'd like to see on product pages, and have tried to accommodate these desires in some snazzy new product page designs.  We started with the Sun Fire Opteron-based products, but look for this same approach this next year on some others.

I think the new designs are pretty striking. Some highlights:

• Extensive use of imagery to illustrate key product features -- lots more "under the hood" and other photography from the systems, so you can see what's inside and a bit about how the systems are put together. In particular, check out the image "Gallery"
  
• Restructuring of page information architecture to reduce clutter and simplify navigation
• More visible placement of "Price & Buy" and special offers
• Much more vibrant writing style
• More spec info in a better layout
• Easier access to reviews
• Better direct links to resources like the Sun System Handbook and spares info

The first pages in the new format are the Sun Fire...V20z Server, V40z Server, W1100z Workstation, W2100z Workstation.

4. The New MySun Portal

An update to My Sun included new features for customers and a vastly enhanced iForce Partner Portal. Some of the new additions:

• One-click access to select ebusiness functions such as Order Status, Product Catalog/SunStore, Online Support Center, and more
• A new personalization feature that puts you in charge of the content and layout of your portal page and lets you add tabs to better organize their information
• Improved usability & user interface enhancements
• Multi-language support (translated views incl. Japan, Korea)
• Permissions (role) based access with control down to link level
• Some selected additional features, tools, and collaboration capabilities as needed for partners and selected customers
  
• Single integrated, automated customer & partner registration
• Enhanced, integrated Partner Administration tool enabling partners to manage and entitle (assign permissions) user access.
  
  

5. Blogs!

Blogs.sun.com is certainly the most fun we've had in the web space this last year, and it's been exhilarating to see hundreds and hundreds of Sun employees turn into regular publishers.

It's also been a blast watching Jonathan, Mary and Will vie neck and neck for the top traffic spot... it's been fascinating to read John Clinghan's Solaris and system updates, Rama's always unusual oddities from hither and yon, Will Snow's sagas on DOS attacks, and of course Jonathan Schwartz's always thought provoking postings on everything from technology trends to pricing models to oddball ebay postings.

I find the content posted on our blogs to be much more interesting and fresh than any of the typical blather generated by tech industry marketing departments, and we can all hope that the corporate blogging trend will in general make industry communication a lot more open, understandable, and... well... entertaining.

6. Sun.com in Your Inbox

Did you know you can get a regular email summary of the many of the articles, product specials, videos, and other content that appears on sun.com? Just subscribe to the Inside Sun newsletter.

As you can see in some of the newsletter samples online, the newsletter includes sun.com feature stories, highlights from Jonathan's blog, product special offers, articles from trade publications, and lots more.

BTW, you can also subscribe to a wide range of additional special interest Sun newsletters for developers, sys admins, IT architects, educators, and others at the Sun.com subscription center.

7. Standard Logins

This probably sounds like a little thing, but this past year we've made sure that most of the key Sun sites you'll use share a common login system.  That means your same basic login and password will work at (and transfer between) sites as diverse as the Developer space, My Sun, Training, SunSolve, US Sun Store, Online Support Center, and others.  We're working to apply this common identity system to all sites.

8. Events, Real and Virtual

This last year we offered extensive event coverage on our sites. Some highlights...

Network Computing events online: Every quarter on sun.com, we offer virtual "Network Computing" events (you know, the ones whose names sound like a Federation ship ID... with labels like "NC04Q4"). These are free and worth checking out -- you get a front row seat to our key announcements without ever having to leave your desk... and there are some really energized talks and demos from the likes of Scott McNealy, Jonathan Schwartz, and key product experts and engineers. A really neat aspect of these is that you can chat directly with Sun execs and technology experts right after the event.

It's at: http://sun.com/nc

JavaOne Developer Conference: The best way to really experience this extraordinary show is to attend live, but we do our best to present the spirit of the conference on the web. The JavaOne Conference this last year was covered on at least seven different major Sun web areas, including a sun.com feature story, live streaming video and replays of keynotes, deep technical coverage on java.sun.com/online, extensive blogging on blogs.sun.com and java.net, and voluminous press information and photo galleries in the sun.com News area.

"Its great to find so much online about the events on JavaOne," a sun.com visitor told us after enjoying the offerings routed from the sun.com home page feature the week of conference.

By the way, a lot of content coverage of JavaOne this last year was through blogs. One of my favorites was the JavaOne "Photoblog" produced by Tony Welch.
And JavaOne is at http://java.sun.com/javaone

SunNetwork Conference: The SunNetwork Conference is the premier event to learn about Sun technology and products from the experts who develop them as well as those who have deployed advanced systems in real world environments.  This year we offered some blog coverage, webcasts, and of course conference catalogs and sign-up. The conference site area is at: http://www.sun.com/sunnetwork. P.S. The upcoming Sun Network is in Barcelona, May 4th & 5th... might be worth working on the travel justification now!

9. New Java.com

A newly revamped of Java.com site was launched on stage at JavaOne in June, featuring tons of new stuff, including...

• New games, applications, ringtones, and screens
• Snappy enhancements to the visual design
• A broader focus on both enterprise and consumer offerings
• Extended navigational systems to support all of the new content

Also this year, the Java.com design got a nice write-up in designinteract.com, the online property of Communication Arts, a highly respected design magazine.  Check it out... Java.com is a fun site.

10. Making Things Better Behind The Curtain

There's a lot we've done this last year that you won't see directly. It's behind-the-scenes work we do to understand how you're using the sites and what we can do to make them better. Some of the techniques we use include:

• Usability testing, where we bring customers into our labs to try out new designs. Sometimes we also do these remotely (via phone and online) to get a worldwide audience. Often we also do "exploratory" tests to understand a specific subject area, such as support or downloading
• Surveys, where you give us ratings and comments on pages across the site
• Mechanical integrity scoring, where we run scans of content for use of metadata, working links, titles, and other attributes
• Query metrics, which tell us what things people are searching for most. (A lot of searches on a topic isn't always a good thing, BTW; sometimes it means that item is just hard to find!)
• Site metrics, which tell us what areas are most popular, and also help us understand common click paths so we can improve navigation (we recently switched to a new system, which is based on browser access rather than direct "hits" and you'll sometimes see your browser accessing addresses such as "sunglobal.112.2o7.net" to log traffic. BTW, this is aggregated traffic and not tied to your identity or account.)

By combining this data, we've created a pretty nifty "quality scorecard" (at right) that we can apply to specific areas of the site and also specific tasks people are doing, so that we know what to improve.

You can help us improve the Sun sites by filling in site surveys and giving honest opinions on the page rating widgets that appear at the bottoms of most Sun.com pages.

11. Happy 10th Birthday Sun.com!

Sun's web presence turned 10 years old on January 28th, 2004, and to commemorate this anniversary we put together a neat feature. The feature story includes stories of the original site launch and early designs, and has an extensive gallery of screen shots showing sun.com through the ages.

See:  http://www.sun.com/2004-0128/feature/

12. Kudos to Sun.com

Finally, thoughout 2004, Sun garnered #1 rankings in Summit Strategies' measures of site effectiveness and usability, based on a expert evaluation of 53 ratings that look at integration of design, navigation, marketing, eCommerce, support and training. Separately, the Developer areas (java.sun.com, etc) received similar honors. This was really gratifying for us on the web teams, and we're hoping our hard work will continue to make the sun.com world highly usable and useful in 2005!