Recap: Opteron Pages as a Web Design Case History
A few months ago I posted a bunch of different design lessons from our
experience of redesigning our Opteron pages. Since these appeared
over the course of several weeks, I thought it might be useful to recap
them in a convenient posting.
The steps we followed for redesigning these pages pretty well track to
our general
design methodology for big design projects. Here are the relevant
postings:
Checklist:
Before you start a web design project: A pretty good overview of
some of the things to consider before starting a major section redesign
or major site overhaul. Includes a lot of common sense business
questions that people often fail to answer at the outset.
Our
Opteron Product Page Strategic (Design) Brief: A simplified version
of the "strategic brief" we used to summarize the product page redesign
project. This is definitely worth a look if you're planning a redesign
in your company; it incorporates all of the "check list" stuff in the
item above.
Web
Design: Time, Costs, Sticker Shock: A bit of a reality check on
what big design projects can cost.
Segments,
Profiles & Personas: Talks about how we use customer personas
and profiles to guide our design work, and explains what we did (and
didn't do) for the Opteron page redesigns.
Content
Audits and Mapping with Existing Content: Explains how we mapped
the previous Opteron product content into the new designs, to ensure
that we weren't forgetting anything. And how we filled content gaps
that our customer testing had exposed to us.
Wireframes,
IA, Tigger &
Pooh: Explains the process of creating "schematics" to show the
structure of pages and sections. (And explains an analogy with animated
motion pictures.)
Photography:
Planning Pays Off: Shows how we did up-front planning to develop
photo concepts before going into the studio.
More
Product Photography Reflections: Shows more explorations we did to
get the photography just right.
Web
Designs: Locking Down Visual Options: How we created comps from
near-final photography and visual components to create the final design
you see on sun.com today.
And
From Korea: A translated and localized version of the same page.
Repainting
a Well Architected Page: How we fit the Opteron visual design into
the new Sun.com redesign that we rolled out May 2nd.
In the next couple of months I'll post some war stories about our
recent massive redesign of sun.com, with lots of tips about how to
manage redesign of a major corporate web presence and also notes on
what practices to avoid if you want to keep your sanity and hit your
schedule.
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