Sun.com Home Page: Hocus Focus

So, following up on yesterday's posting about the new Sun.com home page: What changed between the last page design and this new one?

Previous home page:



New home page design:



If you squint at the screen from 5 feet away, these pages probably look identical. But there are some subtle changes implemented in the new version of our home page:
  • New hover links at the very top of the the page (actually, we added these last week but they're pretty new so I thought I'd point them out to you). For instance, hover over My Account and you see links to both My Sun Connection (a nicely updated My Sun page) and a way to register for a new account. Or, go to the Cart icon and you will see links to saved items, quotes, order status and more.
  • A self-rotating "carousel" of feature content in the main section of the page... wait 20 seconds and it will page through to the next featured item. You can see what's happening without even touching your mouse :-)
  • "Promotions" (our name for deals or offers) has moved to the right side of the page: This makes it easier to see what special offers are available, and also frees up some space at the bottom of the page.
  • The "news bar" now docks nicely with feature content. And we moved the blue pulldown menu bar to the top... (more on that topic next time)
  • New "activity boxes" at the bottom of the page. These are my favorite part: We've added 4 panels down below that provide windows into Sun, including a "Participate" box that showcases Jonathan Schwartz's recent blog postings and (if you click on the grey arrow on that box) views into recent blogs from the Sun community. The "Find & Buy" and "Downloads" boxes make it easier to jump to popular products & downloads.
An interesting early discussion we had was whether we should radically alter the structure of our home page to accommodate some of these new ideas, or change it more subtly. In the end, we realized that the current footprint and framework for the page work pretty well, and that we should update and morph rather than unsettle everyone with a gratuitously radical change. (Sean McKay of ConnectFive helped us through a lot of this conceptual thinking, IA work, and information design; you may have been Sean's work at RoomandBoard.com and other sites.)

There's a bunch more to tell, some of which I will cover next time in a more detaled anatomy.

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Posted on: Dec 07, 2006

Posted by: MartinHardee

Category: Usability

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Comments:

I know for a fact you have dozens of talented usability and visual design folks there are at Sun, so how come every design project you undertake seems to involve paying other companies to help out? No wonder you haven't turned a profit for years...

Posted by numpty on December 09, 2006 at 06:48 AM PST #

Well, there's a long answer that should probably be the subject of a separate posting sometime. But a short answer is: Our design staff for the Sun web sites (and engineering staff, too) is quite a bit smaller than many companies doing a similar volume to what we do on the web. About 90% of what you see on our web sites is developed by our core team. But sometimes it makes sense to get additional help from outside. This helps us (1) extend our team without having to hire a full-time person and (2) bring in new ideas from people who have often worked on dozens of different types of web sites. (If you haven't noticed, computer industry web sites don't tend to lead in design innovation... there's much more creative work being done in other spaces.)

Posted by Martin Hardee on December 09, 2006 at 11:34 AM PST #

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