Web Engineering

So we've been having a lot of discussions internally about increasing functionality of our websites, and one of the things we've discovered in talking to our customers is that we're too complex. Many customers don't even know we have certain capabilities, and our websites are not nearly as well integrated as they should be. It's led to some interesting discussions about value (customer perceived value) vs. functionality.

First a little history of the web at Sun

I was part of the team that built www.sun.com originally, a long time ago. It was a really fun time - there were a bunch of very dedicated folks that were actually building sun.com on the side - this wasn't anyone's real day job.

A single team was never allocated to work on all things web. Every time the company would try to build a web team, they'd run into resourcing issues and the team wouldn't be able to deliver the functionality the business units were requesting. So the BU's just funded it themselves.

This led to our current state of lots of disparate (siloed) websites, many of which are unknown. In addition, we've seen duplication of infrastructure... Instead of a few dev/test environments you get lots and lots. Instead of one portal you have many portal infrastructures. And lots of infrastructure means lots of people that are supporting that infrastructure, instead of delivering value to the customer.

We're working hard to fix the siloed website problem. It will be a long haul, and there will be great resistance to it from the business units, until they figure out that they get to use their resources actually delivering the app instead of spending them on supporting infrastructure.

So back to the original premise of this blog - value vs. complexity on the web. It seems logical that increasing functionality provides the customer with more value - in a somewhat linear fashion. I propose that this is wrong. Our discussions with customers seemed to indicate that at some point, they just get overloaded with information and websites and just give up. In other words, the site is too complex to find anything. . This has led us to the conclusion that "less is more" (gee, I think I've heard that before...). In the web it's critical that you provide the information your customers need at their fingertips. Web design is critical to making this happen. And it has to be a design that takes into account everything the customer is likely to want to do. I'm glad we have some really impressive web experience folk working on this problem - it's a real nightmare (particularly because of the organic growth nature of our web sites).