Making an Entrance

“We knew we were going to have video and other elements coming, but we couldn’t address them all in this first phase,” McKay says. “We had a limited amount of time. We could have spent all of our time developing a particular module so it could do this and that—or we could get the whole thing launched, learn from it, and make incremental changes. We decided to do [the latter] so we could watch the pattern and the flow.”

In order to accommodate future content, McKay and Bohmbach created specific guidelines for the type of content that would appear in the various content modules in the lower half of the page—boxes with the headings “Discover,” “Download,” “Buy,” and “Participate.” The last, for example, is a doorway to Sun’s employee blogs (including CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s much-sought-after musings). “We wanted to tune the home page so every piece of real estate had a purpose and a defined goal, and we could understand how it performs,” Bohmbach says.

“So now, when something needs to be added, the conversation is not about changing the page. It’s about certain parts of the page functioning in certain ways. If you want to add certain kinds of messaging or a link, this is how we do it.” In essence, the designers have done the same thing to the home page as a personal organizer does to a house. They’ve come in and put everything into tidy boxes where it can be accessed quickly, easily, and intuitively. The challenge has been to make a large amount of content easily accessible to a diverse array of potential users. “It’s a question of ‘How do we shortcut people in?’” Bohmbach says.

Measures of Success

Initially, some stakeholders in the project were pushing for much more radical changes to the home page. But they’ve been pleased, McKay says. “I was pushing back against them and challenging that idea,” he admits. “I asked them if that was really the right thing to do right now. But the good surprise has been that the business owners were happy with what we did. It’s been successful in that sense.”

McKay says he’s glad the look and feel remained similar—partly because of the time crunch, but also because it has made it easier for him and the Sun metrics team to analyze traffic on the page. “Newness impacts the [usage] pattern,” he says. “Once it wears off, only then can you see how people are using the site over time and what the patterns are.”

A few patterns have emerged:

•  The new “Products” pull-down menu is one of the most popular areas on the page.

•  Promotion click-throughs are up 65 percent, and online sales engagements have doubled.

•  Feature stories remain popular, with stronger traffic.

Sun’s metrics team is still emerging, Bohmbach says, but its work is becoming high-priority. “When Sean came in and helped us on this work, it was really the first project where we looked at the measurements first,” she says. “It’s been pushing us further and faster in a direction towards this design-with-analytics-in-mind kind of mentality. But we’re still getting up to speed on that. We know there are some things on the home page that aren’t working, and we know there are some things we’d like to do to understand it better. We want to formalize the process so that we re-address the home page every year and ask ‘What have we learned, and what do we want to change?’”

Note: Bohmbach and McKay gave a presentation about Sun’s home page redesign for a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association event in February 2007.