The Return of the Design Comic

April 7, 2008

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.

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

You Know, Like CNET

April 4, 2008

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.

Listening Post: The Who: I Can See For Miles

Web Prototyping with NetBeans

April 2, 2008

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.

I’ve not settled on a development environment since I started trying to use them in earnest a good few years ago. Most of the things I’ve used to try and support rapid prototyping are not really IDEs at all, but applications that just do one thing, meaning I end up using 3 or 4 of them and try to stitch everything together rather unsuccessfully at the end. If I was being really pedantic, which I am, I’d say the best development environment I’ve ever used for web prototyping, where the web part is actually a web part and not just a photoshop part, was XEmacs. I know some of you reading this are going dewy-eyed at the very mention of it, before you get back to work on Dreamweaver.

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.

Listening Post: The Prodigy: Poison

Project Overlap

March 21, 2008

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).

Listening Post: The Wombats: Moving To New York

The IA Has Landed

March 19, 2008

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…

Listening Post: Robyn Hitchcock: Surgery

IETab for XHTML Traps

March 19, 2008

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.

Listening Post: Sleater-Kinney: The Fox

Sun.com for SMBs

March 18, 2008

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

Creative Suite: Au Revoir, Bonjour

March 14, 2008

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.

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

Sun.com Works of Art

March 13, 2008

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

Unified Web Feedback

March 12, 2008

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.

Listening Post: Aphex Twin: Flaphead

Things what I writ