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

It's amazing how much a little bit of planning helps the quality of any project. For the product pages I've been talking about recently, we did some quite thoughtful up-front planning on photography that made a world of difference in the quality of the final pages for our Opteron-based products.

As we approached this project, we were actually caught in a bit of a dilemma: We knew that in addition to stronger writing, powerful visuals were needed to really make things pop. But we were also worried about over-doing the visuals or getting them wrong. After all, our more technically oriented visitors -- who do a lot of evaluation and recommendation of our products -- tell repeatedly how much they hate "marketing fluff." (often they use stronger words than 'fluff' :-)

So, fluffy, meaningless visuals were out: We knew we had to create pages that made the products pop through the screen so you could feel like you had them in your hands. And, to avoid the "fluff" factor, we had to create an approach to photography and visuals that imparted a lot of useful information in addition to simply making the online experience more interesting and engaging.

Chris, our chief visual designer, started by sketching out the photography concepts with OIC, an able company down in southern California. Concept work is really important, because it gives you models that you can use to think things through on paper before you set up an expensive photo shoot. It lets you think through the kinds of specific shots you need, close-ups you'll want to be sure to grab, the lighting you'll want across all of your photography, and the kinds of post-production effects (reflection, etc) that you'll want to be primed for.

Here's an example of the kind of product sketch we did when starting the photo planning for our Opteron workstations and servers:

We did a lot of these sketches to plan out exactly how we wanted the product to appear in the final shots. I think the conceptual planning paid off in a big way, because we got a ton of different shots and we able to use the abundance of photography later for page features that we hadn't even initially contemplated. As one example, we took a ton of closeups and inside shots of all of the systems, and were later able to use them in the photogallery that features call-outs and explanations.

Good concept work pays off.