Excluding mechanical issues like temporary broken link cruft, the comments are around 3:1 in favor of the new design. This is pretty heartening to us given that of any kind of change tends on any site tends to attract some negative feedback simply due to the fact that things are different. But of course no design new or old is perfect, and we have continuing work to do to make Sun's web as good as it can be.
Here are some examples of the mix of comments we've been getting...
Positive: "Wow"
Positive: "Much Cleaner than it was before. The information in the server areas is getting much better as well. I like the power load calculators very much!"
Negative: "The new design is far more worse than the previous one. You had a great, recognizable scheme, why messing with that."
Positive: "Nice cool (cold) colors, tidy layout."
Negative: "Quite dull."
Positive:
"The
page looks more neat and informative now."
Negative: "Why does SUN change its Web pages so frequently. Every time i know where to find something, everything is changed. Bad!"
Negative: "As opposed to previous shiny and bright site new one all look blurry and somehow hard to read."
Positive: "Nice color. Good layout. Great products. Thank you Sun!"
Positive: "The site is well laid out, easy to access and a wealth of knowledge. I'm a british university student on computer science, and i now have the API documentation as my most visited page."
Negative: "blah. difficult to find info."
Positive: "Easier on the eyes. Although the information is the same, it somehow jumps at you more. Can't explain it. Good job, it just works!."
Positive: "Cool, it's more navigable compared to the previous version."
Positive: "Its stylish .. "
Negative: "Difficult to move around"
Positive: "It is much easier to navigate and find the information I am looking for quickly without resolving to google or some other search" functionality. Also, better looking graphics and orderly use of 'space' within a page."
Negative: [The looooooong discussion about colors, variable-width fonts, etc. on the Java forums.]
Positive: "I have received help from sun and have been extremely pleased with the service"
Negative: "I have used sunsolve for years and I have never had so many problems finding information as with your new version."
Positive: "Sunsolve has always been there for me when I needed it for my everyday job. it's not just helpful with Sun product but with Veritas product. Example: Volume Manager. Keep up the good work."
Positive: "Very good site. Well done"
Positive: "Very clean NOW look, Informative & easy to access & Navigate. WELL DONE!"
Positive: "THE BEST SUN SITE EVER!!"
Though many of these comments seem to contradict each other (and we have hundreds more), there's a deeper truth: Many things about the new site work great, but there are probably some other areas we've broken or made more confusing... or just changed enough to be annoying to you veterans who've been using sun.com for the past 11 years. And of course, there's no accounting for color taste so we can't help there (too much). What we're doing now is diving into specific areas of the sites, and the tasks your performing there, to see if there's a correlation to positive and negative comments and ratings and those task and location factors.
As we analyze deeper, I'll post info about the big wins of the new designs and also about some of the big or little mistakes we need to fix.
Tunes: CD: Soundtrack, Garden State
