Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

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.

Listening Post: Future Radio Online

Bring Me A Taxonomy

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.

Listening Post: Supergrass: Sitting Up Straight

Sun.com for SMBs

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?

Listening Post: Half Man Half Biscuit: Breaking News

Sun.com Works of Art

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.

Listening Post: Beth Orton: Someone’s Daughter

Are We Ready Yet?

Web ready? There must be some simple process to make sure that all this product data is stored somewhere, so that we can access it it when we’re rendering product content on sun.com? No? Ah. But there is a process. There’s a few.

Designing interactivity based on product taxonomies is really interesting stuff. There’s a number of ways you can slice the data which enables you to present compelling experiences that drive to conversion. It’s even more interesting when you’re designing on an assumption of what those taxonomies look like, rather than what they actually look like. There is a point up to which you can make sensible design decisions, based of top-level and subcategory branching, for example, but there does come another point where, without the data, you really don’t know whether you can entertain alternate experiences, through, say, filtering across common product attributes. If you don’t know what attributes there are, you don’t know if they are common.

But designers like challenges. The challenge is often to get folks to lust after the design so much that they’ll give you whatever you want. I’m asking for the data.

Listening Post: Public Image: Public Image

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