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

Comicbook panels are all the rage right now for use in the design process. They're a great way to develop and illustrate customer experiences. The popularity of comicbook style recently is much due to the recent evangelizing of Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao at YAHOO!, but I think the reason the idea has spread so quickly because comics are an almost universal medium.  Comic storyboard panels are useful for testing out and co-developing design ideas with customers... and also quite useful in illustrating desired experiences or pending user experience train wrecks. They work equally well with engineering and marketing groups. and of course any tool that engages engineers and marketroids in the same conversation is truly valuable.

Until this spring, I hadn't thought for several years about using comic panels in design work: At Sun, we had coincidentally used a comic style in an online product tutorial many, many years ago to illustrate some software product features. It was fun, and they really told the story of the product well and internally served as a bit of a communication tool when the product was in development. But this project was long forgotten when our Chief Information Architect Jennifer Bohmbach approached me all revved up from hearing Kevin Chang speak about comics. I showed her the old tutorial panels, and she immediately encouraged our team to give these comicbook scenes new life by using them to illustrate the experiences being developed for new online products.

The use of comics in the last few weeks has already proved fruitful. Unfortunately, I can't show you the most compelling use we've put them to so far, because it's a product in early development and we used the comic panels to explore a potential user experience meltdown as disparate siloed components converged into one horrendous and disconnected experience. The pictures were really effective at helping us all understand the problem we were creating, and so we're fixing it now, largely thanks to the awareness created by the comicbook story.

However, the good news is that I can show you a series I whipped together to illustrate the customer ratings system that we recently rolled out on some of our Sun.com product pages.  This comicbook was primarily intended for internal communication vs design development, but many of the same principles apply.

Since we had blank panels and scenes, this comicbook story took only 30 minutes for me to put together, and I think it did a nice job of illustrating how the ratings would work in real life. We put these together in a StarOffice presentation, which I've exported to small GIFs here...



(BTW, one drawback of using blank panels is that you can't change the characters' expressions. She should be smiling in the panel above. But you get the idea from the bubble, right?)

And now we reveal a bit of what she is looking at...


Note that so far, we've found that it helps to combine screen shots with the comic elements once a design is far enough along. This is a bit of a debate in the comic-for-design world right now, since in early phases of design it may be distracting to have actual wireframes or screens -- what you're after in the early phases of development is more concept that final designs.  But anyway, for a pre-rollout communication, combining screens and characters works well for us. YMMV.



We figured it was good to show all the screen portions in this particular case.  So, another panel here shows the rest of the screen...


Then we illustrated the fact that the ratings go through a quick review vetting by humans to make sure they are spam or off-topic. (If I had more time I would have done some panels showing how our vetting services doesn't filter based on positive or negative tone but rather they just screen for spam and such. But in this case we just would explain that verbally when we're walking through the panels...)

Next we did a scene switch to show how another customer a half a world away might read the comments and benefit from them...



More screens here, to show how the previous customers reviews have become part of the system...



Plus an picture of an additional related screen, just for context...



Ok, this next one is a little salesy, but this was for an internal audience focused on marketing stuff, so a little salesy-ness never hurts...


And a final closing panel to wrap up the story and underscore the message...


Closing note: Since this particular series was intended for communication to marketing groups, I left out a lot of twists and turns in the story. A more typical set of panels would have some pros and cons mixed in, like (for the T2000) including customer comments showing the CoolThreads systems are incredible as web server and database monsters but others saying they're not a good choice for floating point (use one of our other Sun Fire servers instead) and then showing the customers making decisions based on those comments.

Tunes: 43: The Wait: Built to Spill

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