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

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