Making an Entrance

Fortunately, much of the needed information was already in house. “We have an ongoing voice-of-customer program, so we kind of know what people are coming to the site to do,” she says. “We didn’t have to go do that extra research.” Voice-of-customer is jargon used in the Six Sigma process improvement practice to describe a program that continually evaluates customer requirements.

McKay says he helped facilitate among various groups at Sun. He and Bohmbach conferenced with members of the information architecture, voice-of-customer, design, metrics, publishing, and project management teams. They interviewed stakeholders such as product groups and marketing personnel to find out what they needed.

“We went to people asking ‘What are your business needs?’” Bohmbach says. “‘When you publish content to the home page, what is it you are really trying to accomplish with that?’ We really tried to keep it very focused on how these things should perform, as opposed to ‘I don’t like that color.’ Then, really, it was a matter of figuring out how we could address those needs in the design.”

McKay examined existing metrics—data that shows how visitors find, move through, and exit a site—to find out which parts of the home page were being used to their fullest potential, and which were dead ends. “There were some limited metrics in place, which Sean did a deep analysis on when we started,” Bohmbach says. “We utilized what we had, and then we made a plan to be able to measure on an ongoing basis. We led with the notion that we would really understand what we were trying to accomplish with this, and set those as a list of goals. Then we wanted to make sure we were thinking about the analytics all along.”

From studying traffic and brainstorming with the user experience team, the duo found the following:

•  The home page acted as a “front door” 95 percent of the time; users were not returning after they navigated away, but were instead using navigation tools on connecting pages.

•  Search and main navigation tools were used heavily.

•  Features and promotions didn’t get as many click-throughs, although the promotions did at least get consistent low-level attention.

“When you have traffic on a home page like this, it’s kind of like electricity or water,” McKay says. Visitors are looking for the path of least resistance—or the easiest way to get what they need. The goal is to identify the users’ innate tendencies and then design the site so that those tendencies lead them where they want to go.

McKay says one major problem was that the large features on the page didn’t give any clear call to action. Their bland “read more” buttons didn’t speak clearly to any one of Sun’s many audiences. He and Bohmbach improved the situation by rotating features through the space on a several-second cycle. That way, more products and services could be highlighted in the same amount of space without crowding. No one feature needed to speak to every audience—if one wasn’t exciting to a user, the next would be. And the calls to action were specific, such as “learn more,” “buy online,” and “qualify now.” The promotions section in the upper right portion of the page got a similar treatment.

“We pushed marketing to use multiple calls to action to address all of the company’s different audiences,” McKay says. “Even though they had one message going out, we knew that each of those audiences would want something different out of it. So we wanted to give the audiences the opportunity to find what they were looking for, without having to dig through several layers to get there.”

Everything in its Place

When a company has as many stakeholders as Sun does, its home page has a tendency to become cluttered over time. Every time an executive wants something new on the site, it’s shoehorned in. Over time, the page’s contents accumulate in an ad hoc manner, and its organization becomes jumbled. That had happened to Sun’s home page before the 2006 changes.

“One of the things that we had as part of the goal was to have a structure that was really well designed,” Bohmbach says. “We wanted to make sure we’re anticipating some of the future needs so that it didn’t get [cluttered] again.”