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

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

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