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

Tim Bray points out recently what a wishy washy label "Solutions" is, and how we have this 'vile word' in multiple places on the new Sun home page. Tim's rant is also my rant... and the rant of every information architect and designer at every high tech company. We all hate "Solutions!"  Or at least, we hate this wretched label because it is so meaningless. But the truth is, without a "Solutions & Services" section, where would things like Sun Grid live?  Or information about datacenter consolidation services? Or information about Identity and Security in Government? Or managed services? Though it doesn't excuse the label, there are more things in the world than will fit into a product catalog. 

The "Solutions" label problem illustrates the problem all companies have in creating a good information architecture, which must simultaneously:

1. Provide clear names for anything that a customer might want to navigate to, paying particular attention to the main missions and tasks on the web site (we have a list of common customer tasks, including their need to understand what kinds of services and 'solutions' are offered by Sun beyond point products)
2. Provide a home for all the things a company does and wants to talk about this (we have this also, in the form of content inventories and site maps)

The trick is to come up with a organized navigational framework (an "information architecture") that groups things into logical categories so that your site visitors can find things. There are some pretty classic methods you can use to ferret out good labels and structures, such as:

• Consulting  a thesaurus (did that of course, no help for an alternative to 'solutions')
• Brainstorming among folks who work on the web site
• Asking customers their opinions (did that lots and lots)
• Asking customers to sort index cards and label them (did that too, more later)
• Doing clustering with survey techniques such as method of triads (more later on this too)

Unfortunately, none of these methods yielded a good alternative to the word "Solution". Though we've been looking at the problem of labeling "Solutions" and "Services" for several years, we simply haven't come up with better names that work navigationally for the web site. So for now, they stand as they are.  But we're always looking for a solution for the solutions conundrum... so if you can solve this one, send us your answer. (And, yes, we thought about simply labeling it '42' :-)