Notes from the sun.com design team Sun.com Web Experience Design

Watching TV on a computer is a bit like playing World of Warcraft on a phone - you probably can, but it's a bit rubbish. There are some rather nice players out there right now, like the BBC iPlayer, but the main reservation I have is that I'm as likely to watch programmes, that have already been aired, via my computer in my office as I am to watch them via my hard disk recorder in the living room. Which is not very likely. Once a programme has gone, it's pretty much gone, and I never seem to to find the time to go back and 'watch again'. Unless it's a Robyn Hitchcock documentary on BBC 4. I can always find time for one of those.

I've often listened to my friend John Murray commentating on a mid-week champions league match on Radio 5 via Real Player from the BBC site, as I'm supposed to be on a conference call about widgets or something, and that works pretty well. They sometimes even sync up graphic scoreboards to give you something to look at while you're listening, but really, its still not like watching football on TV. I could probably find last Saturday's Match of the Day and watch it again on Wednesday, but it's not like watching it at the time and it's not live football anyway.

So all hail ITV. Even though they have a reasonable offering in the way of recently aired items to pick and choose from and watch again, what really makes itv.com worth going to is the fact that I can watch ITV channels there. Live. Well, a few seconds delay, but it's a live stream of the 4 ITV channels, not a stored, cut, archived and expired (usually) version of the ITV output. This is hugely significant, as it means that should, for instance, a UEFA Cup final happen to clash with a conference call about prototypes, then I am now able to have the full moving pictures of the game, as it happens, next to an InDesign document of web design components, while pretending to know what I'm talking about on the phone. I wouldn't actually do that, of course, I'd be 100% committed to the conference call, but let's just say that's a plausible scenario. I did try an experiment with the itv.com pictures streaming and John commentating via bbc.co.uk, to see how they might sync up. It took a few minutes to work out who was lagging, and to my surprise, the Radio 5 audio stream is about 2 and a half minutes behind the ITV1 video stream, but even that was better than listening to Clive Tyldesley (that doesn't translate well, but I expect Dave will understand).

Of course, the whole thing is pretty much 'undefined' as an experience if you're using Firefox, as the player requires Silverlight, but frankly, there are times when I'll just use Internet Explorer and be done with it.

Technorati Tags: streaming video internet tv bbc itv

Listening Post: The Roots: The Return to Innocence Lost

I just had a call with Ben, Mr Usability, regarding some work we need to collaborate on as part of our web feedback program. We've been looking into the user experience across our feedback systems on various venues and trying to simplify and standardize a number of the interactions. This effort has been really quite specific in focus for sun.com, based on the nature of how we gather feedback there through our contact forms, but we really do a whole lot more than just ask you to point out broken links and typos.

You may have noticed that we've rolled out the 'floating math' feedback widget across sun.com. In fact, the widget, in various formats, is rolled out across a wide range of Sun web venues and is gathering mightily useful data from those sites. Well, aside from the comments about how we suck particular parts of primates anatomy, of course, but, in general, specific, constructive and informative.

The whole thing is powered by lovely people at OpinionLab, and I was lucky enough to have Ben walk me through the administration interface to give me a better understanding of the capabilities of their templated comment card system and the deployment of widgets and embedded components. There was a time when we would take a look at a system like this, kind of like it, and then build our own. On Solaris. Using vi. Thankfully, we're much more ready these days to let folks who really know what they're doing provide these services (yes, I know we have to pay), and work out how they interconnect and communicate with our own systems. In the case of OpinionLab, is seems this is an exercise that they are more than happy to work with us on to get right, which is good, because now they'll have to work with me to try and get it right, which is a user experience I can't possibly comment on.

Technorati Tags: usability feedback

Listening Post: Bloc Party: Atonement

You know that, of course, but how do you buy our servers? For as long as I can remember, and in line with how we structure our organization, we've presented our product lines on the web by the product categories by which we refer to them. This means that if you're looking for our servers on sun.com, we think you might want to look for them by their parent category. Right now, we'd be in a great position to answer customer questions like "What CoolThreads servers have you got?", or "Show me all your blades", but, really, is that the kind of question you have in your head when you come to sun.com to look at servers?

Maybe you'd actually prefer to see our servers presented in terms of their attributes, so that you can begin your research by asking "What servers have you got that can run Linux?", or maybe "I've got $5000 and I want a Sun server now. Show me what you've got". In any case, you'd be hard pressed right now to complete a customer journey like that without going through a number of hoops. Backwards, probably.

So, at the moment, we're looking at what's important to our customers in terms of the way that they look for our products and how they might expect to see them grouped, or otherwise, so that a subset of products is a meaningful subset of products, that can support directed searching, categorization and a much more targeted presentation model. I mean, do you really need to know everything about why our products are so great when you've already come to sun.com to find the products? Is that product category landing page just telling you a bit more than you need to know, when all you really want to do is find the products? Perhaps, in actual fact, you don't know what you're looking for and you do need help in understanding just what Sun servers there are and how they are differentiated from the competition. Either way, we want to try and support those interactions as efficiently as possible and, from a user experience perspective, make it a pleasure to be engaging with us.

We have great people in the team conducting user evaluations and interviews and gathering as much data as we can in order to direct our designs, but, you know, you might have something to say about your experiences on sun.com and what you really want to be able to do when you're researching our products. If you do, let me know, and we'll feed it directly into the design process. If you don't want to comment here, you can always email - my name is Tim Caynes and I work at sun.com, so the address isn't difficult to fathom.

Technorati Tags: web design user experience

Listening Post: Future Radio Online

I had made a mental, not physical, note to myself to attend the online knees-up that was yesterday's Sun employee event in Second Life. Of course, I was extraordinarily busy doing web prototype updates and determining the length of various pieces of data string yesterday, so I forgot all about it. In any case, being in the UK timezone meant that by the time Jonathan was speaking, I was already driving to a grotty venue down by the river to see a band nobody likes, and when Liz Matthews was taking to the stage I was probably lying in a pool of beer surrounded by students half my age screeching for an encore.

The fact that I missed it, however, and that various people have since recounted the experience, made me want to revisit Second Life and reconnect with the possibilities for syncing up some of our web experiences with the whole other-worldliness of planet Linden. I first signed into Second Life well over a year ago and we had a few meetings in there and talked about marketing opportunities, building experiences, what the engagement model was and all those kind of ethereal things that a new environment makes you think about. Lou was particularly visionary, of course, and was able to articulate just the kind of opportunities that Second Life could offer and how we might weave it seamlessly into our key customer journeys. Most of us, however, were just trying to pass the 'you can now fly' exam and wondering where you could buy those enormous body parts from.

Sun does have a rather lovely presence in Second Life these days and people like Fiona and Christy have obviously done an enormous amount to raise awareness, as the success of the events demonstrate, but there's still that disconnect between how we're engaging customers on the old rickety web and how we're able to interact directly in Second Life. It was designed that way, of course, so what do I expect, but I'd like to do more than just copy-and-paste a slurl for an event. Perhaps there's some neat Second Life Grid API in the pipeline that supports web-based collaboration via the platform or something, or maybe we'll start pricing our products online in Linden dollars. However it manifests itself, it would hopefully be more than just jumping from one world to the other, either by a web-based slurl, or a SL-based web browser. That's just like wearing your anorak inside out and calling it a new coat.

Anyway, to my reason for going to Second Life today, I thought I might do some of that social interaction thing and pretend to be someone worth chatting to and maybe catch the fallout of the employee event somehow. How wrong I was. I mean, I might not expect to see it thronging with hordes of flying groupies around the Sun Pavillion at lunchtime in the UK (2am Pacific), but there's always a Java developer from Belgium or something, looking at the free Sun jackets, surely. Not today. No green dots. Just me.

I hung around for a while, taking screenshots of myself, like I was on holiday, and decided to take a sneak look at Club Java, just to make sure there's were no swingers hanging around that had missed the last virtual bus home. There wasn't, so really, there was nothing else to do...

I think that's called the 'dad at a wedding' animation, or, in my case, F12.

Technorati Tags: second life

Listening Post: The Mars Volta: The Bedlam In Goliath

Praise be for the sight of our erstwhile über data architect, pontificating on the nature of content engineering strategies and all things modelled. It's been far too long since Kristen has regailed us with those neatly crafted unified product model things that she does, but I guess that's what happens when they make you a director. You have to do all that director stuff instead. Thank goodness I'm at least 3 steps removed from that particular career move then, right?

In the web experience design team, we have a number of ongoing projects that really are all about how the data we're using is architected (which is not a real word, surely), in order that they have any chance of success. In reference to Kristen's latest entry, this is mostly to do with how we define the data sets for products, such that we are able to build efficient, manageable content management capabilities while also being able to easily organize the information across multiple venues and in multiple formats. But it's also about understanding the key attributes of our products that really differentiate them in our customer's minds, and how we design for interactions, based on those attributes as selection criteria, whether they be as filters for directed searching, or determining navigation hierarchies. I think I may have almost made some sense there. What I'm really saying is that if we don't have people with large brains figuring out our data architecture, then the value of the systems we manage and render that data with approaches zero. There's probably an appropriate reference to polishing waste product I could use here to labour the point, but I wouldn't do that.

As well as enlightening those of us with smaller brains, of the things Kristen gets to do in her blog entries, which I'm kind of jealous of, is add all those code fragments and scary-looking class diagrams. I can do screenshots in the dark and post those, right-aligned, but I just don't have any groovy code stuff to share, and I know people like that stuff. So I've taken to stealing some of hers and rolling my own.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<stolen-object>
  <label>Data Model Browser - CEDM 1.0</label>
  <explanation>
   <p>The CEDM Data Model Browser describes concepts and attributes that are 
      core to the <b>Tim Code Envy Data Model</b>. This 
      version [CEDM 1.0] covers Tim's pathetic code envy as it is represented 
      in <b>blogs.sun.com, timcaynes.com, and most other places</b>. Things 
      that describe tantrums, impotence, or just plain stupidity are not 
      included in CEDM, but they should be</p>
  </explanation>

  <concept id="envy">
    <label>Envy</label>
    <explanation>Actual thing to be envious about.  The core frustration 
                 to the model owner (e.g. "You've got loads of code about data
                 and stuff and I don't have any, boo hoo.").
    </explanation>

    <implementation-guideline>
      Use an idiot as a stand-in for the envy itself
    </implementation-guideline>
    <association ref="wetfish-id"/>
    <association ref="name">
      <constraint>Strictly syndicated through a wet fish</constraint>

    </association>
    <association ref="description"/>
    <association ref="image"/>
    <association>
  </concept>

</stolen-object>

There. I feel better already.

Technorati Tags: data architecture web design

Listening Post: Supergrass: Sitting Up Straight

First of all, full marks for getting high page rankings and integrating all sorts of lovely flash advertising and web 2.0 features like the google user pop-in, user comments and article sharing, plus filters, subscriptions, related stories and gazillions of regular ads, without really compromising the page download, but, really, where's the content gone? This is the regular, non-member, non-CEO, non-attaché, non-content view of a regular forbes.com page and if there was ever a web 2.0 version of the blink tag, this is pretty much it. There's so much going on here that it takes a while to even fathom where the content is. I mean, obviously its in that slot under the header and next to the left navigation, but with so much distraction (ads doing what they do best), it takes a while to orient yourself. Its a bit like trying to focus on the horizon when a boat is pitching uncontrollably and you're just about to take a second look at the lobster thermidor you had for lunch. And there's no handrail. And no boat.

Its probably unfair to pick out Forbes, as there's any number of article-based sites out there which adopt this style of page format. I say, 'adopt this style', but what that really means is 'crams as many ads into the available space', even if they are those circular ads which are published by, and point to, yourself. I guess I still hanker after solid design frameworks and excellence in user experience, but as the channels on the internet converge with the channels on TV and other media, it's predictable that the demands for return on investment drive the content model. Perhaps I should be tipping my hat to the page designers who manage to actually squeeze some content into these pages, notwithstanding the requirements for ad placement, cross-marketing, subscription targets and everything else. That is a real user experience challenge, albeit not one I'd like to have to take on.

As we begin to talk about 'content channels' for sun.com and how we surface rolling content on our existing navigation and page class pages, we are in the (probably) enviable position, from a user experience perspective, of owning not only the whole page, but also the content channel itself, so we can build it pretty much anyway we see fit, within our established web design framework. Maybe it would actually be easier to know that for given page types, we are only allowed to utilize a space 200x200 in the 3rd column using specific technology and hosted on a 3rd-party server that only allows you to add clear text and a 60X60 graphic - but easier isn't necessarily better.

Mind you, we haven't designed for the sun.com content channels yet, so its difficult to pontificate about the relative merits of total ownership of design against paid-for content services, although, naturally, that won't stop me.

Technorati Tags: user experience web design

Listening Post: Holy F**k: Lovely Allen

It is quite possibly a consequence of my patience becoming inversely proportional to my age, but recently, waiting for ad servers to respond in order to complete loading a page is really ticking me off. I'm not bothered about about ads which take a while to load while I'm actually reading the page I requested, but what really gets my fingers drumming on the desk and puts my laser mouse in imminent danger of being crashed unceremoniously against the woodwork with accompanying cries of "c'mon! C'MON-AH!", is ad server code that halts a page load mid-stream until its finished its business. I'm sure the page owners have bought into the most efficient geo-located edge-based web service out there, so why is it increasingly the case that while pages get faster, ad servers seem to get slower? Perhaps it's a deliberate interaction feature, I mean, nothing grabs your attention more than a broken page, but from a customer experience point of view, I don't think that's a journey I would normally care to continue with.

I'm aware that we deploy our own ad server across sun.com, and that's not always bulletproof, but, as you might imagine, I look at as many sun.com pages as any other commercial/consumer sites, and I never have noticeable ad server lag on sun.com. I'm not exactly co-located with the sun.com servers either, being on the free internet in the UK, so I don't get any special treatment. Maybe because we own the deployment of our own ad server, we're in a much better position to monitor performance and make adjustments - I can't pretend to understand the technology behind it (well, ok, I can) - whereas, as is the case for any web service you buy into, if you get your ads delivered by a 3rd party, you can't do much about the external reference issues. That's been true of any page you care to publish since html 1.0 - once you include external references as core components of your page, you're really asking for trouble, notwithstanding any service level agreements you might have in place (and they're always great, right?).

Even as I write this, I'm looking at Facebook and waiting for a hair loss ad to appear in the left-hand navigation. It doesn't actually break the rendering, but it does annoy me all the same - the delays, not because it's targeted me for hair loss products. Although, that is pretty annoying...

Technorati Tags: ad server user experience

Listening Post: Spiral Vertigo: What I'd Really Like To Say

They've never really been away, but there's a number of places I've been recently where they'd tell the story just perfectly, so I recently dug out all the old slides I had, and got any stuff I was missing from Martin's site, and I'm looking at running some scenarios past people, with the comic treatment.

There's no simpler way to get the message across when you're trying to highlight a particular use case and they're a great, self-documenting way to describe a unique customer journey. More often than not, because they're particularly good for delivering bad news, I pull together all the slides with the really scary close-ups of disgruntled customers' faces, and add suitably appalled call-outs, to make a really heavy-handed point, but, hey, that's ok, as long as you put a joke in, right? Those ones are generally reserved for 'problem' scenarios, where we know there's something wrong, but clickthrough and omniture data doesn't always describe the user experience. Its a kind of 'once more with feeling' approach to describing a problem. To prove something's not working isn't always enough, you have to be able to show what it means to a customer as a result, and the way I'm doing that is with the faces of customers looking, well, pissed off annoyed.

They're not just for bad news though. Most of the characterizations are at the delighted end of the scale, verging on the ecstatic in some cases (that would be for something like the super download speed on the improved docs.sun.com or something), all the way through to Dr Spock puzzlement (not finding products on a product gateway). Some of my favorite artifacts are the customer scenes, such as the 'overhead typing' view, or the 'yes, I'm still in the office at this time' view. My very favorite, however, is the 'cubicle farm', which, even after working from home for 4 years, makes me twitch a little and look over my shoulder when I see it.

If I come up with anything remotely entertaining, which isn't entertaining because I'm highlighting some disasterous product portfolio deployment or something, then I'll share it here. Until then, I'll just post the usual meaningless kind of nonsense.

Technorati Tags: design comics user experience

Listening Post: Add N to (X): Barry 7's Contraption

Before you even get to the point where you ask 'what is your content?', there's an apparent understanding that you need to work out how it surfaces all over your site. Since the very early days of sun.com, one of the biggest goals, as far as maintaining a healthy visitor profile goes, is just how to make things sticky. I'm not talking sticky as in the stuff that makes you go eeuw, but sticky like the invisible elastic brain rubber that compels you, against the gravity of your free will, to revisit those places online that have already visited. It's the same reason you go back to Fry's every so often, just to see if there's any new technology stuff to dribble over, or why you ping last.fm or iTunes to keep up with released, related, and recommended. It might also be the reason you visit Gap every Friday lunchtime - you're just checking it out to see what's new.

But how do you know what's new and where do you expect to find that out? When you're looking at something the scale of sun.com and trying to determine customer behaviours for a given page type, it's not alway a simple task to predict. You might be the kind of visitor who would casually visit the sun.com home page and, not unreasonably, expect to see anything newsworthy enough, that you might be compelled to actually invest time in, to be present right there. You might be more specific than that. You might be the CTO for an SMB or some other suitable market research defined acronym pairing, in which case, you'd probably know that we've got a place just for you, where you'd expect announcements, deep-dives and news to appear, relevant to your needs. You might even have a large propeller sticking out of your head and be interested only in what's going on with Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and how that relates to your development requirements for your linear accellerator or something. Either way, when we've got news for you, we want you to find it. And we want you to come back again. And again. And again.

So that's why we're currently investigating new approaches to surfacing the bestest, most currentest, content around, that's relevant to you, in a way that's going to make you want to come back often, but not take all day to consume when you're engaging with us. One of the ideas we're floating around (or select another flagpole/envelope/conceptualization buzzword bingo term of your own there) is content channels. You know, like CNET. We could funnel these content streams into various containers on product pages, gateways, category pages, etc., so that what's most relevant to you is right there, where you want it, on-demand, so to speak. In terms of web design, this a quite a nice proposal, as we can have the content live elsewhere and suck it through a virtual 'news pipe', which spits it into, for instance, the servers container. Which would probably be quite sticky. Of course, someone, somewhere, needs to be owning, managing, publishing and maintaining the channels, but on the assumption that that would be possible, then a modular approach to deploying those channels where it makes most sense would be, um, neat.

Technorati Tags: web design user experience

Listening Post: The Who: I Can See For Miles

For the best Ajax-ready environment to support rapid development, its got to be NetBeans 6.0. I think. I mean, I've not actually used it yet, but I do have a need to build some prototypes for dynamic web frameworks that include little widgets and JSF bits and pieces (probably) to enable me to look cleverer than I actually am, which, unsurprisingly, isn't difficult.

The problem with most applications, IDEs, or whatever toolkits I've come across, is that they invariably do at least one thing that constantly irritates me. Not the kind of thing that irritates me that you can turn off in an options screen, but the kind of thing that irritates me because its intrinsically the way the application does what it does, whether its the cumbersome previewing methods, or the sublime adherence to a doctype declaration I didn't specify, or even just having windows with fat, ugly borders. Actually, that last one is the kind of irritant that would bug me the most.

So, I'm hoping that NetBeans will be something I can call my friend. If not, its back to XEmacs, a gin and tonic, and a long night of ctrl-c, ctrl-v and ctrl-bladder, until I've hacked together a product finder that surfaces on not just product gateway pages, but the whole of the moon.

Technorati Tags: web design netbeans ide

Listening Post: The Prodigy: Poison

I know you just love it when you find out your project overlaps with about 4 other projects doing kind of the same thing, but from a different place. That just happens in large-scale organizations, however we arrange ourselves and whatever processes we try and stick to. So when you gracefully collide with the business teams, the publishing and engineering teams and at least 1 other team you didn't actually know existed until this morning, in a conference call that gathers all the stakeholders, it nice to get a good outcome.

We're currently taking a deep dive, or whatever you call it, into the design framework we need in order to support the content architecture around product lines. In other words, if you happen to be the director in charge of, say, server marketing here at Sun, what is it that sun.com needs to do for you? I mean, we know a bunch of stuff about what people are actually doing when they hit those landing pages (we're calling then category pages, for the record), but what is it that we're wanting them to do, and from where did they enter, and to where are they going? Its all very well me just drawing a fancier looking media panel and assuming that we know what's going to play there, or even if it should be a media panel at all. I can use terms like 'customer channel' as if I know what they mean, but in the end, as designers, we're trying to understand the customer journey, in order for us to determine navigation paths and build a design framework that works for everyone.

Which is where collisions are helpful. As long as you have super efficient people around you to pull those overlapping projects together (designers don't really do that kind of stuff very well), you might just strike it lucky and start the conversation at the point where you're all saying "well, that's kind of what we're trying to do". And that's what happened this week, which made everything fit together way more neatly than it did last week. I finally get to the point where I know what's required, we're engaged with the stakeholders, and we're all talking the same language.

Typically, I'm on vacation all next week, so I'll forgotten it all by the time I get back (only joking).

Technorati Tags: web design project management

Listening Post: The Wombats: Moving To New York

Its been a good long while since Martin left us to ramp up the customer experience over at Cisco, and then our über information architect, Jennifer, jumped ship for a measly directorship. Since then, we've tried to maintain a steady course through the icebergs of web experience design and other shipping analogies that have come our way. Sometimes you can pull in the slack, and share the extra workload between those of you that are left, but its not always been super effective, and, from an IA perspective, we've become slightly rudderless. I mean, we can launch the rescue boats pretty effectively when we're responding to web distress calls, and we've always been pretty good navigators, but there's not really been anyone up in the IA bridge for a while, playing a strong captain's role.

So, hurrah! then, for the arrival, this week, of our new Lead Information Architect (and for a paragraph devoid of nautical wordery nonsense). Holly started on Monday and will, I'm sure, do a great job in her new role. I'm already putting her name next to a number of projects that desperately require the attention of someone who actually knows what they are talking about, and I'm looking forward to seeing some much-needed IA focus back on our projects. Welcome Holly. I've got this web feedback task taxonomy that needs a bit of work if you're available. Oh, and the product categories could use some direction. And the gateways of course. And what about that home page stuff? etc...

Technorati Tags: information architecture

Listening Post: Robyn Hitchcock: Surgery

You'd think I would check. First rule of web design and all that. I mean, we extensively test our web design components against all the platform and browser combinations out there, and Andrew and Greg are constantly redefining CSS elements so that we maintain a consistent style, whatever you're using to connect to us.

But that can't save me from being a lazy arse. I like to put images in blog posts to illustrate points, or just to make myself less uninteresting than I am. I also like to have them aligned left or, usually, right, with text wrapping around them. This is from the HTML 1.0 handbook, right? So I was rightly ashamed of myself when I installed the IETab add-on for Firefox the other day and took a look at some blog postings. Initially, I'd installed IETab to try and sync up PicLens with a thumbnail folder view of an enormous image directory as presented as a windows explorer view. That didn't work, but I thought IETab was kind of interesting, so I duly went away and 'IETabbed' my bookmarks.

Oops. seems that that old align=right hspace=8 vspace=8 ain't what it used to be, and probably hasn't been since about 2003 or something. For blog templates written in HTML 4 (of which there are tons out there I've used or written), this old syntax is just fine, even if it's like the 'Hello World' of web design, but, you know, if it ain't broke. Except it is broke. In XHTML 1.0 (correct me if I'm wrong, but only in your head), those handy attributes are deprecated, so if your doctype declaration contains the XHTML 1.0 string (like this blog template), the page rendering is undefined. No problem, then, if you've been using Firefox since forever, because Firefox just understands that some people out there can't code for toffee and gracefully deprecates on your behalf. Internet Explorer, however, throws its toys right out of the pram. Because we always gave IE a hard time in the past for being rotten with supporting web standards, it gets all fussy if you make mistakes these days. At least, mistakes in the way IE wants to implement XHTML.

Suffice to say, align=right translates to something like align=centerwithnowrapanddoitrightnexttimeidiot. Meaning this whole blog has looked a right old mess on IE since I started. My fault really. I should have checked. How authoritative I must have appeared, spouting on about web design standards, customer experience journeys, usability and everything, when the very page I was writing looked like someone has thrown up a flickr photostream at random in between the passages of pompous rambling prose like this.

Anyway, you're probably reading this, if anyone is, through google reader or something, so it really doesn't matter. A new class in the CSS for those images fixed everything pretty quick. In case you're using FireFox, and you're now thinking "oh, I might just take a look at my blog to see what it looks like but I can't be bothered to start Internet Explorer which I can't anyway because I'm on Solaris and I don't happen to have a virtual version of XP running somewhere", then try IETab. It eats memory like children eat cakes at a birthday party, but its worth it.

Technorati Tags: xhtml web design blogging

Listening Post: Sleater-Kinney: The Fox

We've got a new place for Small and Medium Businesses on sun.com. Take a look. It's called "Sun's Place for Small and Medium Businesses". And guess what. It's full of stuff for Small and Medium Businesses.

Why is this significant? You'd be correct in thinking this would be very old news for some of our competitors, who have their entire portfolio of products and services arranged by business or audience, right from the home page and throughout their sites. Sun, however, never ones to follow a trend, have always adopted a product-oriented information architecture and stuck with it through sea-changes in marketing and sales. Whatever our key messages are, and however they are woven into the fabric of sun.com, you know you can always find our products by following predictable and consistent paths. There have always been logical groupings of products as solutions, or as part of selected promotions, but, you know, they've never really done the job of speaking to a particular market segment.

So that's why the Small and Medium Business section is important. It's a first step into supporting customers that might share common business needs, rather than providing a bunch of great products that might fit together as a discrete solution package. Of course, what's important for a specific market is how our solutions enable them to solve their business problems, but previously, you'd be looking for the solution yourself, rather than having your own space, where Sun is able to highlight those that we already know will be important to you.

It's only a start, in terms of designing for addressable markets, but the change in focus for the information architecture is hugely significant, so it's an exciting development. You are still reading this, right?

Technorati Tags: smb information architecture

Listening Post: Half Man Half Biscuit: Breaking News

As all good designers know these, you need lots and lots and lots and lots of hardware and software to do your job properly. I first started using Adobe Photoshop professionally at version 2.5, which I guess was about mid-nineties. Sun being Sun of course, back then, a Mac or a Windows PC was anathema, no, worse, the antichrist or something, so the version of 2.5 we had was actually the port that ran on Solaris. which was probably also version 2.5. Actually, that port was pretty good, I thought. Especially as you could run it on a Sun box. I think we had it installed on a few Ultra 2s with 1GB of memory, which was immense in those days, and so everything moved along very nicely. Mind you, without layers, there was only so much you could do at a time. You just needed a huge filesystem to hold those 50 saved versions of each file. Luckily, everything was networked to the nth and so that wasn't a problem either.

Fast forward to 2008 then, as I sit in my home office, on a slightly creaky Windows PC, and I'm hitting some problems with my design tools. I'm still with Photoshop, of course, except now its part of Creative Suite 3 Design Premium, and all the good stuff that comes with that. What I also still have, though, after 4 years in this room, is a single-core processor, 1 disk, and only 2GB of memory. Doesn't sound too bad? Ever run Adobe Bridge? Anyway, since installing CS3 a while back, things have not run smoothly. Most recently, I've had nasty problems with failure to boot or shutdown, and my suspicions have been aroused by the network activity icons blinking away in the corner as everything else fails to start.

As most good designers know, poking around in the innards of your operating system is never really a good idea, but some self-diagnosis was definitely in order. After an afternoon of software removal and starting and stopping of services, I, not surprisingly, could not find a cure. How serendipitous, then, that I should receive and email from Adobe, inviting me to join their user-to-user ("this is NOT adobe support you MORON") forums, to share and collaborate with my designer community. I thought I might see if anyone was sharing my 'Adobe Bridge 3 CPU 100% hang crash metadata read' problems, when I stumbled upon multiple threads about something called the 'bonjour service'. I had seen that in the services manager in XP and thought it was something to do with XP ordering croissants for me. I mean, its in Program Files, not under Adobe or (as it turns out it might well should be) Apple.

It seem that the bonjour service is installed as part of CS3 and is responsible for initiating network connections to Adobe Version Cue servers. Bonjour is Apple software and is also part of the iTunes installation, by the look of it, which is why it appears to be installed as a standalone product. This might be very helpful is you are actually using Version Cue, especially in a large organization with distributed servers for DAM. Its not particularly helpful if you're not using Version Cue. Its spectacularly unhelpful if its actually hanging your computer and using shedloads of resource when its up and running. There are a number of ways to stop bonjour, if its causing problems. I found the most effective thing was to actually remove it. Since I have done so, I've had no problems with hanging startups or resource draining. I'm yet to try and use iTunes (which I hate anyway), to see what problems might lie there, but for now, I don't really care. I can get on with crafting comps for category pages. Oh, and writing huge, sprawling blogs.

Technorati Tags: photoshop adobe cs3

Listening Post: Bloc Party: Flux (Rev Terry's Drone On You Flux-uating Diamond Mix)

Not my words. Those good folks at siteIQ conducted a regular, in-depth, web site best practice review of sun.com towards the end of last year, and there were some great highlights. There were plenty of lowlights too, of course, and we're already figuring out our way forward as we try and resolve some of those, but, as I have my trumpet out, I'm about to blow it.

We put a great deal of effort into how we support customers through the buying cycle. In the past, we've not had great success with integrating ecommerce activities into our product pages. Product buying has always been something of an uncomfortable appendage on sun.com - a kind of strange distended web version of the dead people in the Sixth Sense - but, in recent years, we've evolved our ecommerce capabilities into a compelling, well-rounded customer experience. Its very satisfying to see that the latest siteIQ report picks up on this and singles out the 'Get It' tab on our product pages for singular praise. From the report (referencing the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 Server):

"Kudos to Sun.com for a 'Get It' page that is truly a work of art. This page starts by putting SPARC servers in multiple contexts for visitors, including price, compute power and scalability."
"This page leads to a short and well crafted e-commerce clickstream that allows buyers to quickly configure additional options and purchase the product in two additional clicks."

The fact that this whole experience hangs together so well is due to some supercool customer experience and interactive design work in the web experience team, and some key collaborations with our publishing and engineering teams and ecommerce vendors. What we're actually talking about here is the seamless integration of of the ecommerce platform, that drives the transactions, with the sun.com environment, where we're supporting your decision making process. That Get It tab is part of the sun.com information architecture, of course, and navigating between tabs on a product page is a consistent and coherent design experience and all that, but its not actually on sun.com at all. Toot!

That last bit was my trumpet, by the way.

Technorati Tags: web design ecommerce

Listening Post: Beth Orton: Someone's Daughter

If you really want to let us know what you think, there's any number of ways you can let us know, but these days, we should expect you to chose the web as your primary channel. In other words, we should support you pretty well on Sun's multiple web venues if you want to provide feedback on our products, services, or simply to let us know that the x4100 page has an apostrophe in the wrong place (which was probably something Iv'e done).

The truth is rather more sobering, as it is for many large-scale web sites. That's not to say we score badly. Its just that there is room for improvement. In the last year, there has been a team at Sun dedicated to resolving all our customer interaction issues, whether it be from first contact on a sales phone line, or a click on an email link, or even when you get your hands on a piece of Sun hardware and open the box. They're even looking at the box. One of the key components of that work is understanding the customer journey from first contact through to resolution. That might be manifest as a phone tree, or telesales lifecycle, or as a web feedback system.

One of our biggest tasks in understanding how to design a web infrastructure to support the wide range of web feedback we receive at Sun, is to map the customer journey from first contact, through task filtering and into an internal feedback system. Broadly speaking, this customer interaction can be categorized in three distinct phases; invitation, submission, confirmation. Within those phases, there are a number of related subtasks and subsystems that actually make the thing run (technical term there), but from a design perspective, we're really considering how to seamlessly manage the transition between phases and ensure a satisfactory conclusion for our customers. In addition, of course, the whole experience should be simple, consistent and concise.

Its a challenging task, and we're trying to accommodate multiple feedback types across multiple venues, and, naturally, tight project deadlines (which means I should probably be building wireframes instead of writing this). Where we're focusing our efforts right now is on just how far we can go with contextually-driven feedback. If we're able to categorize the invitation in terms of the customer task and the current context, we should, in theory, be able to cut a swathe through a task filtering navigation path and drive straight to the submission phase, where any options or forms are specific to the task. However, we can't be completely confident that our invitations will always be contextually clean. We'll often use a global navigation component to host a persistent link, and it wouldn't be enough to simply assume that because a customer clicked on a link labeled 'feedback' in a footer on a product page that they are necessarily wanting to provide feedback on that product. They might just want to tell us the site is very slow today. It may also be true that even though they may have accepted an invitation to feed back on a particular product, what they really want to say is that we've actually speelled the product incorructly, which we might call a 'typo', which as everyone knows, goes straight to the jitterbug queue labeled 'null'. Only joking.

Why is it unified web feedback? Well, feedback systems evolve, much like web sites evolve. In fact, feedback and venue, in a multi-venue operation such as we have at Sun, are inextricably linked, so we've nurtured distinctly different feedback systems on venues such as sun.com, developer.sun.com, java.sun.com and others. As we try to align operations across venues and increase efficiency for our customers, we're just trying to get to a place where we can synchronize activities more effectively. As far as design goes, unification, even though I''m cursorily referring to it here, is a sizeable problem, so I'm hoping nobody notices that I haven't cracked that nut yet.

Technorati Tags: web design feedback

Listening Post: Aphex Twin: Flaphead

I was pointed to this by one of my excellent flickr contacts. If you've ever struggled through multiple pages of photo pools or even your own photostream looking for that particular image, or just to have a browse around, you'll know that there's still the page-at-a-time top-level filter to most of those operations. There are any number of aggregators out there which might do something different, and yes, you could probably just take an rss feed and roll your own viewing platform, but, you know, I'm not going to do that.

So hallelujah for PicLens. Not only does it do wonderous things with a photoset, pool, contact list, comments list etc., it also happens to manifest itself as a firefox plugin. Not necessarily a big deal you might say, but this is the most un-firefox plugin firefox plugin I've come across. It doesn't just sit in your browser and do neat things, it takes over your entire screen and throws photos around in a 3-dimensional space, offering views of multiple images that you just can't get otherwise. Honestly, it breathes a whole new life into an old photostream and makes you re-evaluate those photos you've seen over and over for the last 5 years. Brilliant

It does allow you to change views, so you can make it look like Adobe Bridge (on a day where Adobe bridge isn't taking 99% CPU and crashing your computer), but its the flying-around-in-space views that really make it interesting. Of course, if you have a 1920x1200 desktop, you need something quite hefty to iron out the judders, but, being a designer, I've obviously got far more horsepower than I need anyway, so it flies along nicely. Do try it. Its not just for flickr, it works on facebook, yahoo, picassa, bebo, myspace, and much more.

I was using Firefox 2.0.0.12 on XP, for those of you who like numbers. I did notice as I was installing the plugin that it said something like 'oh, um, Mac users click here', but I didn't investigate.

Technorati Tags: flickr piclens

Listening Post: Go! Team: Get It Together

Although he refers to his 'cage' rather often, this vodcast/podcast from the senior engineering director for sun.com, Will Snow, is a great insight into the way MySQL is working on sun.com today, and how we're looking at clustering and high availability enhancements with the 5.0 release. I really don't know whether that last statement was technically correct, but that's what Will said, so it must be true.

Will doesn't just look after sun.com though, of course, there's the super-popular subdomains such as blogs.sun.com, wikis.sun.com and a whole host of other Sun web sites, all hosted out of his 'cage' somewhere in a nuclear bunker somewhere under the sea, probably. Its obvious hearing Will speak about the set up that he knows his onions, and he also happens to be rather pleasant on the ear, in a kind of hypnotic 'this is not the hardware you are looking for' kind of way. I've known Will for as many years as I have fingers, and if there's one thing you can be sure of, he knows how to put hardware and services together to create robust, scalable solutions. After all, there's no better way to say how how dependable your products are than by running your own operations on them. At Sun, we run the whole company on them - and we always have.

Now for a gratuitous MySQL link

Technorati Tags: mysql sun

Listening Post: The Streets: Don't Mug Yourself

Its sometimes the small additions to a web design framework that make a difference. Well, to me they do. As I went through the weekly process of trying out the latest feed readers the other day, just to say that I'd tried out the latest feed readers and decided to stick with google reader after all, again, I took some time to revisit the feeds & subscriptions (yes, they're the same thing, but it depends who you talk to) that are available across sun.com, blogs.sun.com, developer, bigadmin, java.net and all those lovely places we call home.

Its thanks to folks like Lou and others that we've done such a good job of getting our subscriptions embedded all over our web venues - and there are a ton of them to choose from now. Sure, there are the occasional dead ends in the subscription paths, but in general, there's a whole range of rss/atom/xml links out there for you to pick and choose from, whether you're a java developer, a press analyst, a system administrator, or even all of those things and more. You might even just want to get a regular feed of the blogs here at Sun, notwithstanding the drivel like this that you might have to wade through to get to the NetBeans or Glassfish entries.

The fact that there are so many can be a challenge, however. From a web experience perspective, we want to be as consistent as possible in terms of the presentation of these available feeds and their context, so that when you're at the place where it's relevant, its an obvious and trivial exercise to to move from content consumer to content subscriber. Now, obviously, as web designers, we hate it when we spend 6 months on a design framework and then you just go and suck out all the content and read it in an application something akin to notepad on acid, but, if you're gonna do that, we want to make even that customer experience a good one. We're so good to you.

Which leads me on to the teeny tiny feed icon. If you snoop around sun.com or our developer site, you might have already noticed it. Its not big, but it is clever. It's driven by metadata attached to the content, and the drop-down menu of available feeds is built dynamically as the page is rendered, so its always current and context-driven, rather than a 'global' subscription list. I mean, we have one of those, but you're not targeting anyone by including that on every page. Check it out yourself on the top right area next to the social bookmark icons on the developer site or the sun.com download page. Simple, but nice.

By the way, as Andrew and Greg aren't around at this time of day, I had to work all that technical stuff out by myself, so I'll go and lie down now...

Technorati Tags: rss web design

Listening Post: Beatles: Hello Goodbye

There is always something nice about creating milestones and to-do lists in Basecamp, when you're not quite sure what to do next with the incoming design specifications. In truth, of course, defining what I am expected to do next is a neat way of putting off what I'm supposed to do next, but at least I know in what order I'm not getting around to things.

I do find that, even though the end result can be reasonably consistent, the way I set up each project is usually markedly different. This is normally because I'm putting milestones in the order that someone else's project plan has them laid out, and then I'm building the to-do lists to align with those milestones. In actual fact, this is probably the best way for me to work, as I am a completely hopeless project manager. I've done a course and everything, but I fear it's application to the task that makes a good PM. Thankfully, I'm able to bank on the support of any number of project managers around here who are scarily efficient, so I've not yet dropped the ball completely.

Needless to say, as I'm writing this, I'm supposed to be checking a box marked "complete audit of user stories & user flows", but this is multitasking. Well, its multitasking as I know it, which is doing multiple tasks, but not necessarily at the same time. Or in the correct order. Or today.

Technorati Tags: project management basecamp

Listening Post: Shelby Lynne: Where I'm From

We just recently resolved an implementation issue that had been going back and forth between Greg, Andrew and me for a good few weeks. It wasn't a big thing, but sometimes the simplest things push the boundaries when I try to do it myself.

For a long time, we've had invitations to talk directly with sales advisors on sun.com, whether you want to chat, call, email or even have sun call you back directly. These invitations have been reasonably prominent in the right-hand navigation of specific pages. More recently, we've been able to embed these invitations by deploying inline rollovers, at the point where customers commit to a call-to-action, making the invitation much more relevant and immediate. You can see the current deployment on some of our promotions, like the Uniboard Upgrade Promotion (until April 1st, which happens to be my birthday, by the way). As you rollover the 'Start Saving Now' call-to-action, our rollover appears, with all the options you might need.

Nice as this is, its actually a pretty cumbersome implementation. When I say cumbersome, I mean, its elegant code (as all our web components are), but the way in which we had to deploy it in the short term left a bit to be desired. Our ever-patient publishing team reluctantly agreed to hard-code the components into specific pages, knowing that that was a huge backwards step, and a potential maintenance disaster - they know we'll change our mind about what's in the component and expect them to find and update it in all the places we asked them to deploy it but never actually kept a record of ourselves. What we all really wanted was a separate source file for the component itself, which could be referenced by a standard piece of code that would be provided to content owners to use as they require.

This, unfortunately, is where I, as usual, said "I can do that, don't worry".

I do know my way around html, CSS, javascript and most other basic web technologies (I expect someone will now point out that it should be HTML, as its an acronym, and JavaScript, or something, just to prove, before I even get to where I'm going, that once being a developer, doesn't mean always being a developer, and in terms of knowledge assimilation once you gravitate to marketing, all your code is belong to us), but sometimes, when you put them all together, and then call it 'Ajax', then I start to lose the plot. What I actually needed to accomplish was quite simple, from an abstract view. I have a self-contained web component (snippet of sun.com source), that exists in 1 source file, say, source.html, and I have a parent page, say, parent.html that contains a reference to that source file as part of an Ajax call which renders the component code so that it can then be referenced by a CSS-implemented rollover and magic fairy dust scatters over the page and the share price goes up or something. If you're still with me, and super-interested, I was actually trying to include a K02v1 DHTML Popup Component, saved as source.html), by calling it from a G32v0 Onload Ajax Include (in parent.html) and then invoke the Popup by using the Popup div id as a class attribute of the invoking anchor in parent.html.

Needless to say, despite my best efforts, I simply could not arrange 10 lines of code and a couple of hash references in the correct order, and ultimately I prostrate myself at the altar of the web design church for forgiveness. Happily, for me, they couldn't either (for about 10 seconds), but eventually resolved the issue with a flourish of staged content, and I took their code and stuck it into my development site. Of course, it didn't work when I tried it, but another couple of hours (and a few gin and tonics by now) later, everything was as we wanted it to be.

The trouble is, it took me so long that Neal probably doesn't even want the rollover any more, but, you know, its useful to 'keep your hand in' with this stuff (not for the developers and publishers who have to clean your mess up, naturally, before they point that out).

Technorati Tags: javascript ajax

Listening Post: Outlaw: Nothing Else To Say

I've come across some dot-versions in my time, but nothing quite so spectacular as the JavaScript source file referenced in my flickr template. As I was flicking through the lines of source - I can't even remember why - I stumbled across this rather nice block:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.com/javascript/fold_main.js.v1.2.1.2.1.3.1.2.1.2.1.4.1.126.1.3.1.8.1.92.1.5.1.6.1.23.1.8.1.33.1.79.1.3.1.43.1.7.1.108.14"> </script>

Not only does it have the most stupendous filename, but on closer inspection, it also includes the lyrics to Stop the Pigeon, Hong Kong Phooey and others, as test data for some kind of bubble div.

It must be time to sign off for the day. I can't top that.

Note: Thanks to Scott for pointing out that since I'm in marketing, I don't know what I'm talking about...

Technorati Tags: javascript web design

Listening Post: The Waterboys: We will not be lovers (via Musicovery)

I normally get a reasonable amount of unsolicited offers for make her saTisfy you wanT prescription cheap online! and insurance I will never need via email. They even filter through the sun.com domain occasionally - congratulations to them - but they are, almost without exception, meaningless twaddle or borderline abusive. What a nice surprise then that this morning I got 38 emails forwarded from a) the blogs.sun.com comment system and b) the sun.com postmaster replying to bounces from the comment system sending to people who don't work here anymore, that were all rather, well, polite in their spamness.

I'm sure others got them, although I didn't check, and Igor was kind enough to let me know what was going on, but the basic message was something like "thanks you very much". There were a couple of variants, like "That is nice", or "thank you admin", but overall, there wasn't anything unpleasant in there. They were only trying to generate traffic back to their domains, bless 'em. I was kind of glad to help out, since they asked so nicely. Of course, after a few minutes, I rang Scotland Yard, replied to the sender with some vicious cease-and-desist, blocked their IP and did a reverse DDOS spam bucket mangle attack, which brought down the entire internet connection of Turkey, after which I felt better. Then I sent then a nice message saying "thanks you for your spam".

I didn't really do all that, of course. I'm a designer, not a programmer or a system administrator. I just looked at the comment system and thought "that's table cell's not aligned correctly".

Technorati Tags: spam blogging

Listening Post: Primal Scream: Shoot Speed/Kill Light

As Jen McGinn relates, there's something going on at the Santa Clara campus, at least, there was, for the last couple of days. I know this, because everyone I work with has disappeared, including my management chain and at least 5 other people I was thinking about working with (well, I say working with, I mean checking their Facebook status). It was the annual Design Summit at Sun and there was a healthy focus on our online presence and a key note from Curtis. I believe there's another summit going on somewhere, so it's all pretty summitastic right now.

I'm not there, however, so I'll miss out on those conversations about design tools, publishing processes, community engagement, calls-to-action, component sets ("no, we use this one, it's a bit like your one, but it's not the same, even if it looks like an application, which its not, its a web venue, even if it does do kind of application-like things, yes I know its a thin line"), and suchlike. I find those conversations are usually the most enlightening few hours you can have with people gathered together in a room for once a year. You might even get to see what some people look like, which is often enlightening in its own way ("your org chart picture must be really old" etc.), which, in itself, is a design consideration I agonize for hours over every morning.

I'm hoping Marilyn and Chris come back all enthused with some tangental web design direction and exciting feedback, but there's always a danger that they'll simply come back saying "they're trying to do exactly what we're trying to do" or something. Perhaps they'll have seen this, and just decide we should all lie down in a dark room for a while.

Technorati Tags: design web design

Listening Post: Aimee Mann: Goodbye Caroline

I'm sure, as usual, I'm way behind the curve here, if way behind the curve is a valid expression for being slow on the uptake, but I've just found the useful social bookmarking widget button things at addthis.com. I've opted into our beautifully crafted Sun template on this blog (which you probably don't see anyway, because you're using a feed reader), and out of hacking roller templates and html, so I've not added them here, but I have added them here.

I had, in a previous bout of template shenanigans, tried to add all the delicious, digg, facebook, etc. links in my permalink and day entries and that worked fine, as long as nothing changed and I didn't need to add any other web services. But, of course, I do. So when I spotted the addthis link on Martin's blog, I figured I would get me own. I expect it'll work perfectly for six months, like Natuba did, and then they'll try to monetize the service and turn it into some cracked up social information troll device selling wallpapers, but, for now, it does what it does, which is takes all the hard work out of keeping track of all the bookmarking, sharing and feed/subscription services out there. Not that anyone will actually share or bookmark anything where I've used it, but that never stopped me spending hours on top-aligning an RSS icon for the same purpose.

Technorati Tags: social networking bookmarks subscriptions

Listening Post: Doves: Sky Starts Falling

I kind of like this video. I mean, I probably should like it by default or something, but I actually like this one. I particularly like how happy everyone is and how sunny it is. As I look out of the window on a drab January day in the east of England, watching someone put bottles into a wheelie bin, watching this video instead is a much better option. As well as everyone in it being sickeningly healthy and pretty much oozing vitamin supplements, I'm always happy to see those shots where you pull back from a scene as far as you think is possible until the disappearing frames turn into dots on a whiteboard and you overlap into an office scene where people are pointing earnestly at things and you continue to zoom back, right out the window, where you see something relevant on the roof or something and you zoom back, a bit like that movie that zooms into the earth's core and back to space again, right back, until the earth is a dot on the screen and it morphs into a dot at the end of a sentence that is so rammed with clarity your eyes hurt.

You know what I mean. The best bit, however, is the house of flying blade servers (about a minute in). I used to occasionally go down to the server room in Bagshot to reboot the remote access modem pool, but it was all pretty static. I don't know how any sysadmin survives in this place though. These guys in yellow shirts must be some kind of ninja sysadmins, or watch the