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

My son and I were hanging out at the offices of Mad Magazine in New York recently, and it sure did remind me a lot of our own web design group here at Sun. 

(I'll explain what I mean in a moment, but first some color: The offices at Mad are rich with history. Included around the small office are a wall of early original covers, props from an abortive movie effort, example artwork that didn't make it into the magazine for reasons of taste or politics, a glass case of spin-off products, and dozens of posters of previous covers, etc. FYI, Mad doesn't really have official formal tours, but if you call as a loyal subscriber they will give you a courtesy walkthrough and entertain your questions (we had a lot) and give you a free button and maybe a pre-release issue of the next edition. [Our son is on the far right, next to Amy from the Mad marketing department and three Mad interns.])

What reminds me of Sun, though, is that most of the Mad design staff works remotely either from home or personal studios, just like our Sun web design team. And they're spread all over the world, just like our larger web team at Sun. At Mad, even on a single article or creative piece, the writers, editors, and artists often work from different cities and collaborate via phone, digital images, IM, and other tools. Written copy and illustrations then arrive to a small production team in the New York office, who scan them in, work them over in Illustrator and Photoshop, and send the proofs to an assembly house in the US Midwest. It is very distributed and disconnected, but somehow they produce a cohesive monthly magazine from the effort.

There's a truism that creative teams must be co-located and work long hours together with shared music, coffee and pizza, but Mad and many other media products (including music) are disproving this, and I believe that truism is in fact becoming a relic of the pre-Internet age. 

Now to Sun: Our design team for the Sun web sites is distributed around the US (and one UK member), and we also tap into vendors located almost everywhere you can imagine. Our group gets together every couple of months for some intensive multi-day meetings, brainstorming, bonding and sharing... and subgroups who are working on projects get together in person more frequently... But largely, folks work at home in their own offices or studios and collaborate electronically. The Sun web design design team consists of several visual designers who work from home (California Bay Area Peninsula, Oregon, Colorado) and from a Sun office (Colorado); information architects and application designers who work from home (Minnesota, Colorado, UK); usability folks, metrics folks, and project managers who work a mix of at home and in office (Colorado, Boston, East Bay California), and regular vendors who work from everywhere.

There would certainly be some plusses if we were all located on a single shared floor space. We could do quick whiteboard drawings, peer over each others shoulders at work in development, kick around new ideas effortlessly. But getting everyone in one place all the time isn't practical today: First, good people live everywhere, and even those in close proximity to a Sun office aren't interested in wasting prime portions of  their days on long commutes via congested highways. Second, since we support global web sites, it's essential for our larger web organization to be distributed worldwide and for our web design organization to be able to collaborate "remotely"; in a global sense we are all remote from one another to a certain degree. And, there's an advantage to having coverage in different time zones and to be able to respond quickly to emergencies, which we can do because of our distributed nature and our ability to jump in on quick projects from home as needed.

On balance, we do better work, faster, than if we were all in one big corporate office. Most of our team would agree that working from home is a huge net plus not only for them but for the final quality of work...

• Working from home is a lot more productive because people can get heads-down time to do real work instead of getting sucked into ponderous in-person meetings or aimless gossip conversations at the coffee station. Working from home, even if our visual designers get pulled into some stupid corporate meeting by phone, they can multitask, putting the finishing touches on the day's home page or setting up a new page top even while they listen to the meeting with relative attention. If there's an emergency, they can IM each other across time zones to address things quickly even if they're on the phone to someone else or working on another project. Since all of our vendors work remotely and deliver their comps online, there's actually not much point in driving to the office.
• We've overcome most of the collaboration issues you'd expect in a design team that can't see each other physically. We can quickly share sketches, comps, photography, and finished designs with one another using an array of basic Internet technologies including simple email and IM.  When we run usability tests in our Colorado labs, for instance, IAs and project managers can watch an internal stream video of the session anywhere worldwide from their desktops. Deep brainstorming, mood board reviews, and extensive visual style reviews are a problem, but we do have in-person meetings every month or two where we get together to collaborate in high bandwidth.
• There's the gasoline savings and commute time savings, which can be considerable.

Then there's the more nimble ability to deal with emergencies:  Ten years ago, before Sun's iWork program, the majority of people at Sun weren't readily connected to the work network environment from home, and on the web teams we would literally have to drive into the office to address emergencies that came up.  I was on several crunch projects where our team at the time brought sleeping bags into the office in case we had to work through the night (which sometimes we did).  These emergencies and crunch projects still come up, but we can work them from home much more quickly and effectively. Frankly, if there's an emergency or crunch that my group or I have to work on, I'd rather we be at home where we can see our families, get the job done faster, and go to sleep right after the job is done vs. driving home from the office in some bleary eyed and sleep-deprived state.

Our remote work style is possible because of Sun's iWork program, which has created a company culture that supports remote work and embues employees with the skills and tools needed to work remotely. And this is a good thing because Sun is a global company with a global web presence, so that in a true sense everyone is "remote" from some of our colleagues at some time of the day (or night).



Tunes: 43: The Mars Volta: The Widow; Death Cab for Cutie: Brothers on a Hotel Bed

Technorati Tag: Web-Design

Technorati Tag: Design