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

As I've mentioned in previous postings, the most important single step you can take in designing anything for the web is to create a strategic brief.  This should be done early in the discovery phase of any design project. The reason it's so important is that it will make you focus and it will provide a guide map for whoever is creating and implementing your design.  To write a strategic brief, you'll need to know a lot of important but oft-ignored basics such as:

• Why are you embarking on this design (or new web site, or whatever), anyway?
  
• What are your business objectives and how would you measure success?
• Who are your various audiences or customer segments and what are their objectives (often different from your business objectives, btw)
• What's the scope: How much are you going to tackle at once?
  
• What sort of constraints do you have in terms of product, business process, technology, or budget?
• What existing projects and groups does this project need to coordinate with in order to avoid a train wreck?
  
• What kind of market and "voice of customer" research (including site metrics) do you already have?
• What are the roles on the project?  For instance, if you're engaging a design vendor what are they delivering vs. what are you delivering to the final mix?
  

If you know these things above, you're off to a great start and your project will have a good chance of success because you won't get into the middle and have to do a reset based on newly understood goals (a situation I've seen all too often both here at Sun and at many colleagues' companies. Sometimes it happens multiple times on the same project!)

Rather than try to describe a brief abstractly, I thought I should instead post an actual Sun strategic brief from a recent Sun web design project. It's for the redesign we did recently of the pages on sun.com for Opteron-based servers and workstations. (You'll need StarOffice or OpenOffice to read this file, BTW. It's about 2.5 MB since it has some pictures.)

Though I've simplified it a bit and edited out some of the sensitive stuff (like specific non-design business objectives), you can use your imagination and know that success metrics usually should concentrate on things like increased revenue, increased customer satisfaction, increased customer engagement (e.g. opt-ins), cost savings, etc.  I've left intact a lot of pretty frank language about things like the state of the original pages, some complimentary and disparaging musings about competitors' and industry sites. The tone of this brief is pretty typical: A good brief should look forward to the future and describe objectives crisply... but it should never sugar coat any existing problems that need to be fixed as part of the redesign. Another thing you notice in the brief is that we looked at other web sites, and some of them not even in the computer industry: Visitor experiences on sites like Mini.com or Nike.com set high expectations that persist when people are back at work browsing for the hottest server.

I'll follow up later with some more examples from this particular project so you can see how it progressed through the four phases of our design process (Discover, Design, Develop, Deploy).

The resulting designs from this project have been pretty popular, and we're thinking of extending them to some more products. Below I've included "before" and "after" pictures so you can see the difference.

W2100z Before....

Cheers.