We Sell Servers
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.
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Listening Post: Future Radio Online
Dear Mr. Caynes,
Well hullo Tim. Looking for input are you? Let me see if I can get the ball rolling. I know we have lots of smart people (also poorer people as of today's market trading) looking to crack this nut. And I'm glad of it.
But in addition to all the focus groups and user testing and behavioral studies, etc., I'd just like to see us do more old-fashioned 'put it out there' and see what works type testing. Some times I think we analyze things to death. I know sun.com is a big complex entity and that it takes a lot of forethought and planning to change the underlying structure, but that doesn;t preclude lightweight tests.
For example - build a landing page geared toward a user who wants a system that runs Linux for less than $10K - then use paid search and other demand gen tools to drive traffic to it and measure how it does. And what the users think. Then try another. And another.
Then take what you learn and build an information architecture, navigation system and page template that supports what works.
Too often we seem to start from the top down - how can we help the user find something. It's a noble goal. But why not start from the bottom up? Make the ultimate destination pages the best they can be -- and then build up from there.
just a thought.... ;-)
n
Posted by Neal Amsden on May 03, 2008 at 02:15 AM BST #