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

Ditucci points out that she already did a much better posting than mine below about the new search highlighting.

Read and compare.  Plus she has a funny story about a woodpecker.

Tunes: 73: Jack Jones, Fly Me to the Moon

Sometimes the best way to address complexity is to ignore it.

I won't say how many different web sites we have, because it's a little embarrassing.  Suffice to say that there are dozens and dozens and dozens (ok, more).    So, Will's Friday posting about web complexity really hits home.  As Will points out, many of these sites grew up for historical or funding reasons, before there was a common navigational structure and architecure.

We have already begun to reign things in pretty well at an infrastructure level, but still there are these many different venues: By far our biggest "information architecture" challenge on the web sites is making everything feel like it fits together cleanly even though in reality information lives in many different places.  I find it's easiest to do this by ignoring the fact that there are many different sites. Instead, we concentrate on the tasks that people do on our sites. Though there are hundred these tasks, we boiled the essentials down to about 20 different scenarios and we build and tweak the navigation based on these.  We hope our new page-top pulldowns really help here.  If we've done our job right, you won't notice that we have many different external "sites" and instead sun.com will feel like one entity. Which, in fact, it is as far as the services it provides.

Another way to deal with a Gordian knot of web site complexity is to take Alexander's approach.  Maybe time for some sword sharpening?

Tunes: XM 21  John Mayer, Why Georgia