Making an Entrance

When designers create interfaces for human-computer interaction, one of the cornerstones of the process is the idea of user-centered design. Web site designers generally use this concept as a starting point. When they set out to rework a site or a page, they begin by asking, “Who are the users, and what do they want? What do they expect from us? What do they hope to find?”

But last year, when Sun Microsystems, Inc., decided to redesign its Web site’s home page, the project leaders found the answer to this key question was far from simple. “The audience [for the home page] is really all audiences that Sun might speak to, so you can imagine the challenge there,” says Sun chief information architect Jennifer Bohmbach, who led the redesign effort. “It’s just an incredibly broad range, because you are talking about technical folks and business folks of all kinds and at all levels. Additionally, there are people who might want to work for the company, as well as people who are investing—all of those people come to the home page. So we are put in a situation where we’re kind of trying to be everything to everyone.”

Sun Microsystems is perhaps best known as the developer of the Java technology platform, but it also manufactures and sells servers, processors, storage systems, and a wide variety of software applications. It’s a key player in UNIX and the open-source software community. Sun also prides itself on its transparency and encourages its employees to blog, unedited, on the corporate Web site.

Sun is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, but it cultivates a decentralized work environment that depends heavily on telecommuting. Bohmbach, for example, works from her home in the Twin Cities. When it came time to redesign the company’s home page, she sought help from a fellow midwesterner: user experience strategist and designer Sean McKay of ConnectFive. McKay is a branding, Web design, and metrics consultant who, in the mid-1990s, helped establish the interactive group at Minneapolis marketing firm Larsen. At the time he began working on the Sun project last year, McKay was located in the Twin Cities; he now lives in Iowa.

“Sean and I have worked together in volunteer organizations in the past,” Bohmbach says. “I knew his work and was very familiar with it. When it came time to resource the home page project, I was thinking about who was going to be the best fit, and he immediately came to mind. And actually, the timing just really worked out, because Sean decided to go independent right when I was needing someone. He was the perfect match.”

Pressure Spots

In early 2006, before the reorganization, there was nothing obviously wrong with Sun’s home page. But there was nothing especially right with it, either. It didn’t take users anywhere or encourage them to do anything. It didn’t answer the question, “What’s new and interesting?” So when the company prepared to launch a new e-commerce initiative, higher-ups knew the home page would have to be upgraded.

“We were essentially replacing our store on sun.com,” Bohmbach explains. “And in order to make that something that you could actually tell we had done, we felt that the home page needed to change as well, to coincide with it. We needed it to have a stronger selling, marketing, and promotional feeling than it had had in the past.”

Time was tight. The redesign project began in late June of 2006 and had to be completed in time for the store launch in late September or early October. So, Bohmbach and McKay limited themselves to the organizational structure of the content.

“We had gone through a redesign of the entire site about nine months previous,” Bohmbach says. “In doing that, we really didn’t dig into the home page as much as I would have liked. So this was our chance to really get that information design right. The visual system, we didn’t change that much.”