Best Practice: Control Points and Governance
I was talking to one of my favorite best practies web analysts last week about the "G" word: "Governance"
Governance is something that corporate web teams tend to obsess about, because in big companies (which usually have big web sites) it's really hard to implement a consistent experience, design, and voice. And, inconsistency is bad -- it confuses customers as they move from one section to another trying to buy your products, get support, or just get to know you.
Most companies have unified roadmaps, as well as committees who try to coordinate governance across areas of their web presence. We do that at Sun, too, of course. But it seems some of our other practices are at least as effective as the roadmaps and meetings: As I described how our processes work to my web analyst she pointed out that Sun has some very good "control points" that make that governance easier. Here are some of them:
Turnkey templates - We have standard templates defined that serve specific purposes. Examples are our product pages and landing pages. We're in the process of documenting a few dozen templates in excruciating detail, but even having basic documentation and live examples to point to is a huge help.
A well-documented component system - Our pages are composed of well-defined components that fit into the pages in standard places. We document all of the HTML components used on the sites in detail, so that all of our web apps, publishers and vendors are using the same standard set. You can see most of our component designs and code at sun.com/webdesign.
Standard CSS - Sun's sites use a common CSS and common .js files that ensure that
components get rendered the right way and behave consistently. A big side benefit of the
standard CSS is that we can roll out design changes very easily. For
instance, we added a "share this page" widget to all our our pages
recently by simply hanging the new functionality on the page title
style (div class="pagetitle").
Standard content management system(s) - I wish I would tell you that all of our external sites run from a single content management system. In fact, we have several content management systems globally, but the good news is that we have reduced the number dramatically over the years. That helps enforce consistently, and moreover, all of these content systems and their associated renderers take advantage our JHTML component system and style sheets. So, even when pages are being served out by different systems they all look and behave the same.
An intake process for new projects - This isn't perfect, but we have
inbound queues of new projects that our design and publishing teams
stay on top of. These queues give us visibility into new projects that
are starting even if we're not driving them from the web team. Having inbound queues (and weekly review meetings of the projects, plus a fact-track for emergencies) helps us stay on top of things and also examine commonality across independent projects. Two reasons this isn't perfect: (1) We should do more engagement management up front to scope ideas before they become projects, and (2) with dozens of new projects per month, and no matter how organized we are there is too much to keep track of!
Vendor selection and training - Because of the volume of work that comes across our sites, we often need to use design agencies. Since we have a small, defined list of agencies -- whom we train either formally or informally on our component systems -- we know they'll produce consistent stuff. (Sometimes internal groups go off and hire non-standard vendors, and the integration of the work from these untrained agencies can become a nightmare.)
Design briefs - For bigger projects, we require a strategic brief (a.k.a. a "design brief") to get started. This document describes design objectives, customer goals, business drivers, stakeholders, and other key bits of information. You can see one of our more elaborate design brief examples that I posted a while ago, though we typically use a shorter form. Creating some kind of project brief is a key way to focus your projects, especially if you are planning to engage someone outside to help with the work.
Walkthroughs and Storyboarding - If you are launching something new and different, it's very important to gather everyone together at least a few times during development, have someone pretend to be a customer or site visitor, and walk through the experience that will be created. You can do this with paper, with online wireframes, with quick rough HTML mockups or slides, or with the comic storyboards I've blogged about previously. But the important thing is to get everyone together and walk through the experience. This is a great governance trick because it gets everyone to focus as a team on what is being created. On a big project, you should walk through many key scenarios and rinse and repeat until you get it right. (BTW I wrote more about this walkthrough topic as part of a larger posting about avoiding bad experiences online.)
(Virtually) central publishing - Web publishing at Sun is concentrated
into a few groups who know our web standards very well. Even groups who
are distrbuted feel like part of a bigger virtual team. This level of
camaraderie and common process is important to ensure consistency.
Domain, hostname, and marketing URL approvals - This is a final early warning system we have at Sun. Things on the web run fast and sometimes a bit chaotically, and, believe it or not, sometimes web projects will spin up without our knowing about them. But we have a secret weapon: In order to register a new domain, get an external hostname, or set up a marketing redirect, folks have to fill out a form. If we get a hostname or subdomain request for some project we've never heard of, it's a hint we need to spring into action.
Video training - Lately we've been doing very short, informal video training and pre-recoded presentations that show best practices in action. These have been popular and also are a quick way to spread learning across the company. (If you are internal to Sun, you can email me for a pointer of our Best Web Marketing Video Ever, for instance.) Though training isn't exactly a control point, it's important to have people up to speed on your web best practices if you want any hope of governing the overall experience on your external web.
What control points work well to support governance in your company?
Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience
Tunes: 43: Jawbox: Spoiler
Governance is something that corporate web teams tend to obsess about, because in big companies (which usually have big web sites) it's really hard to implement a consistent experience, design, and voice. And, inconsistency is bad -- it confuses customers as they move from one section to another trying to buy your products, get support, or just get to know you.
Most companies have unified roadmaps, as well as committees who try to coordinate governance across areas of their web presence. We do that at Sun, too, of course. But it seems some of our other practices are at least as effective as the roadmaps and meetings: As I described how our processes work to my web analyst she pointed out that Sun has some very good "control points" that make that governance easier. Here are some of them:
Turnkey templates - We have standard templates defined that serve specific purposes. Examples are our product pages and landing pages. We're in the process of documenting a few dozen templates in excruciating detail, but even having basic documentation and live examples to point to is a huge help.
A well-documented component system - Our pages are composed of well-defined components that fit into the pages in standard places. We document all of the HTML components used on the sites in detail, so that all of our web apps, publishers and vendors are using the same standard set. You can see most of our component designs and code at sun.com/webdesign.
Standard CSS - Sun's sites use a common CSS and common .js files that ensure that
components get rendered the right way and behave consistently. A big side benefit of the
standard CSS is that we can roll out design changes very easily. For
instance, we added a "share this page" widget to all our our pages
recently by simply hanging the new functionality on the page title
style (div class="pagetitle").
Standard content management system(s) - I wish I would tell you that all of our external sites run from a single content management system. In fact, we have several content management systems globally, but the good news is that we have reduced the number dramatically over the years. That helps enforce consistently, and moreover, all of these content systems and their associated renderers take advantage our JHTML component system and style sheets. So, even when pages are being served out by different systems they all look and behave the same.
An intake process for new projects - This isn't perfect, but we have
inbound queues of new projects that our design and publishing teams
stay on top of. These queues give us visibility into new projects that
are starting even if we're not driving them from the web team. Having inbound queues (and weekly review meetings of the projects, plus a fact-track for emergencies) helps us stay on top of things and also examine commonality across independent projects. Two reasons this isn't perfect: (1) We should do more engagement management up front to scope ideas before they become projects, and (2) with dozens of new projects per month, and no matter how organized we are there is too much to keep track of!
Vendor selection and training - Because of the volume of work that comes across our sites, we often need to use design agencies. Since we have a small, defined list of agencies -- whom we train either formally or informally on our component systems -- we know they'll produce consistent stuff. (Sometimes internal groups go off and hire non-standard vendors, and the integration of the work from these untrained agencies can become a nightmare.)
Design briefs - For bigger projects, we require a strategic brief (a.k.a. a "design brief") to get started. This document describes design objectives, customer goals, business drivers, stakeholders, and other key bits of information. You can see one of our more elaborate design brief examples that I posted a while ago, though we typically use a shorter form. Creating some kind of project brief is a key way to focus your projects, especially if you are planning to engage someone outside to help with the work.
Walkthroughs and Storyboarding - If you are launching something new and different, it's very important to gather everyone together at least a few times during development, have someone pretend to be a customer or site visitor, and walk through the experience that will be created. You can do this with paper, with online wireframes, with quick rough HTML mockups or slides, or with the comic storyboards I've blogged about previously. But the important thing is to get everyone together and walk through the experience. This is a great governance trick because it gets everyone to focus as a team on what is being created. On a big project, you should walk through many key scenarios and rinse and repeat until you get it right. (BTW I wrote more about this walkthrough topic as part of a larger posting about avoiding bad experiences online.)
(Virtually) central publishing - Web publishing at Sun is concentrated
into a few groups who know our web standards very well. Even groups who
are distrbuted feel like part of a bigger virtual team. This level of
camaraderie and common process is important to ensure consistency.
Domain, hostname, and marketing URL approvals - This is a final early warning system we have at Sun. Things on the web run fast and sometimes a bit chaotically, and, believe it or not, sometimes web projects will spin up without our knowing about them. But we have a secret weapon: In order to register a new domain, get an external hostname, or set up a marketing redirect, folks have to fill out a form. If we get a hostname or subdomain request for some project we've never heard of, it's a hint we need to spring into action.
Video training - Lately we've been doing very short, informal video training and pre-recoded presentations that show best practices in action. These have been popular and also are a quick way to spread learning across the company. (If you are internal to Sun, you can email me for a pointer of our Best Web Marketing Video Ever, for instance.) Though training isn't exactly a control point, it's important to have people up to speed on your web best practices if you want any hope of governing the overall experience on your external web.
What control points work well to support governance in your company?
Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience
Tunes: 43: Jawbox: Spoiler
