Web Experience & SEO : Web Design

HP: geek-tech AND chic tech?!

nandini.nayak — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:37:00 GMT

It has been some time since I posted an update to this blog and much has happened in the last few months on the HP web site. We appear to have not done too badly over the last holiday season, some may even argue that we kicked ----!

We released a new home page in November. For those of you who may have been following our experimentation, we have done much testing in the last year and we now feature three task-centric tabs that span across our diverse offerings:

Shop to help you find what you need in the vast set of products and services we offer.

We are still organized around our business segments but our large marquee areas features a quick peek into the innovations happening across HP.

In January we featured some of the coolest ( or hottest!) products in HP’s history.: the HP touch smart , the Mediasmart Server or the cool little dv5 notebook And the most exciting of all the Vivienne Tam Mini "peony-inspired design in the vivid shades of violet and sophisticated reds".

“it looks sooooooo pretty! says one review.

Finally HP can boast being both geek tech AND chic tech !

Explore & Create : with many cool ideas for your creative DIY (Do It Yourself) side. Here we feature many new services for both home and business use. Check out the free printing projects on the HP Creative studio. You may still be able to impress that someone special on Valentine’s Day with one of the many many ideas from our collections.

As an aside, one of my favorite things to say about HP.com is that it is perhaps the one website in the world where you may find both non-stop servers and help with scrapbooks : another bridge between work and life for the the tech sector?

Support & Drivers For the many who come here often we have recently introduced the Support forums to help you consumers talk to other users about front office products. This is in addition to the already very active business support forums.

A somewhat better home page, but still work to be done on the rest of the site. Stay tuned and check back here as we move along in 2009.

More on the HP.com Home Page…

nandini.nayak — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:55:00 GMT

Posted by : Nandini Nayak

In the spirit of Web 2.0 and the “forever Beta” concept, we are doing some additional testing on the US Home Page this week and in the upcoming weeks. Having gathered a full two months of data on the new design we are working on further optimizations.

During this period some of you will receive the previous design and some of you the new modified design. This will help us understand how traffic is being directed and give us additional baselines for further improvements.

You may argue that we are changing too often, but continuous experimentation is the only way we learn how to optimize traffic flows. HP users come from all over the spectrum from consumers to small businesses to large corporations to name but a few. Getting the page “right” to drive traffic to the most relevant areas of the site “correctly” requires constant tweaking and analysis. Marketing and industry events often have effects as well.

This project will always be going on and will never be completely finished.

New Home Page for HP.com now available to everyone.

BlogArchive — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:27:00 GMT

Posted by : Nandini Nayak, Director, HP.com Site Design & Research

I am glad to see some talk on the blog circuit regarding HP’s new US Home page which went into full production earlier this month. There are those who critique us from a visual perspective and attempt to “date” us as if this was about a fashion trend, others give us more credit for trying something new. As usability practitioners, we cannot design by random opinion, we have to let the data speak for itself. Ultimately, it is about whether our users can find the information they seek as efficiently as possible and whether we can communicate to our users what we have to offer in a useful, useable and engaging way.

Our data tells us that we have made significant progress from where we started.

We went through substantial amounts of validation research. We conducted several rounds of in- lab and remote usability testing, eye movement studies and rating scales. We put all this data together to guide our design. We finally put the design through a limited in-production test that I mentioned in a previous blog post. What you see is a result of this work.

Most users gave us very positive reactions to the visual design and scale values were significantly better for the new page. Some were surprised by the change, but we all know change is always surprising, even disconcerting perhaps. But your best usability “gurus” will tell you that as long as you have created a model that keeps the information scent strong, the design will succeed. Every user we tested was able to get to the information they needed using the task oriented navigation, using the segment oriented navigation or using search. On some tasks we made substantial progress in directing customers to appropriate locations.

So what’s really different?

We actively sought to promote content that we knew, through our analytics, was important to users in a task-oriented way (Shop for..; Support & Drivers and a new category of content that we introduced called ‘Explore and Create'..) We continue to have the segment based navigation as an alternate navigation path.

We use some new techniques to reveal content. Users don’t always have to click to see new content, content comes to the user as they explore different links. It is a responsive interface avoiding some of the pogo sticking that occurs when users inadvertently click on links. We have used this feature to reveal not just textual menus but rich imagery that goes with the topic.

We know there are popular notions that tell us that home pages should be a full link list index page of the site. We needed to create a balance, providing broad views of the content with one that actually engages rather than overwhelms users. We have moved away from a link heavy presentation to one that reveals content in chunks as the user explores the different options. Our design creates a balance between being information rich and engaging at the same time.

We have also moved away from “thumbnail” style imagery that some sites apparently favor to images that actually reveal detail . We have found that user engagement with these images is substantially improved. And we have brought a connection between the different media messages we communicate to our different audiences with the stylistic features of our imagery and headlines on the home page.

We believe our users are pleased with the outcome and you will see us continue to improve and refine both the home page and the rest of the site.

An updated home page design for HP.com!

BlogArchive — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:06:00 GMT

We are testing an updated design for the home page of HP.com with a small percentage of users who come to the site. Some of you may have seen this already.

Why are we doing this you ask? Well, a home page is never perfect and it is constantly under pressure to perform better. HP has the unique privilege of having one of the broadest offerings of products and services in our industry serving a wide variety of customers from consumers, micro and small businesses to large enterprises. The home page has to work for all our customer segments and product lines. If we try to put all the important links onto one view it is somewhat overwhelming. While the current home page is functional, we believe there is opportunity to make it simpler and more task oriented, revealing content as users request it. We also wanted to use some new design elements to market our products and services more effectively.

So, in the spirit of continuous experimentation we are once again testing.

If you have seen this updated page please give us feedback. Or respond to this blog.

Landing Pages and Microsites…boon or bane?

BlogArchive — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:40:00 GMT

Posted by : Nandini Nayak, Director, HP.com Site Design & Research

I was recently at eMetrics and then at ACCM, where the topic of landing pages and microsites is being increasingly discussed. A little alarmingly, creative design companies are propagating the optimization of landing pages and microsites to help “conversion”, to the exclusion, I would believe of discussing the optimizing of highly trafficked entry pages on the main site.

Let’s first distinguish landing pages from microsites. Landing pages are entry points into your main website created primarily to transition you from a banner ad, e-mail or ad campaign URL. They are typically simple pages with quick calls to actions that lead to the appropriate place inside your main site. Microsites on the other hand are little islands that can be self-contained auxiliary areas that address a specific marketing need not quite finessed inside your main site.

Recent blog posts (example) argue that..

“A microsite is not a landing page. Typically, a landing page is one page that links the reader to your Web site or makes a simple call to action. A microsite, if used to its full potential, can provide you with one heck of an opportunity to get your newsletter subscribers to move closer toward a buying decision or next level of the sales cycle. A true microsite is multilayered, has more depth, and can be thought of as a launching pad for myriad marketing opportunities. Beyond just a companion for your newsletter, it can be a doorway for search engines, a marketing site for e-marketing campaigns, or a targeted site for brands, products, and services.”

Gee, that sounds awfully like we are designing the core site.

While I don’t want to pour cold water on the proponents of microsites, I think it is worthwhile to first examine whether the core site can achieve the objectives that the microsite intends to address. All too often,you see :

poorly executed sites that cannibalize content from the main site and leave the user at a dead-end because they are not well-integrated into the main site.
poorly maintained sites that continue to live on after marketers have exhausted their $ on driving traffic to the site and move on to the next one
poorly measured as the metrics may not be appropriately tied to overall business value relative to costs

Microsites are a boon when they allow you to address segments of customers with very unique needs; to test market new products and services not core to the main site; but they are a bane when they compete with established entry pages pages and you jump to them as a solution too quickly.

Font sizes: Fixed or flexible…?

BlogArchive — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:04:00 GMT

Posted by : Nandini Nayak, Director, HP.com Site Design & Research

Font sizes: Fixed or flexible…?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which creates the coding standards for the Internet, recommends the use of proportional font sizing as the best way of achieving universal accessibility. The W3C promotes proportional font sizing as a way to put text size control back in the hands of the Web site visitor.

On HP.com we have defined proportional font sizes this way. So you can go from the default which looks like this:

to this:

So for all the people who want to adjust their fonts, you can use your browser settings to increase the size proportionally.

Some websites have <larger text> as a link on their pages to change their one fixed font to a fixed larger font. There are typically only two settings. When you try to use your browser settings to change the font it has no effect on the page. Here is what one user had to say about that:

“I am so sick and tired of websites that don't allow the browser "Change Font Size" feature to work that I just HAVE TO tell you: THANK YOU! for allowing your site to operate the "old-fashioned way"! Absolute point sizes for text in CSS may make websites "pretty" (as well as allowing the designer to be LAZY and not take time to make sure different font sizes work for the layout!) but it's the worst of the worst for those of us who just "need a little help" but not a full-blown screen reader solution. I only need help once in a while, but when I need it and I'm prevented from using the easy FREE feature available to everyone, it's annoying. I hope you never switch!”

That said, there is always opportunity for looking at the default size of the font that you use in a proportional font system. We could go larger but that might results in important content sometimes falling below the fold resulting in scrolling…always the need for balance.

"Pageless" design challenges

BlogArchive — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 17:51:00 GMT

As we consider next generation experiences on the web with RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) we need to figure out how to deal with “Pageless” sites. When a page become interactive and contains rich content it loses its static, stable nature. While this is exciting for designers who can now pull from a richer design toolbox, there are clearly challenges in making this paradigm shift. The “page” metaphor has set up an operational structure for web sites tuned to designing pages, measuring success by page views, having search engines index pages and pretty much using a page as the unit of reference

One issue is design. Have you ever had the experience when you click and go to another page, it looks very much like the last one you were on and you have to reorient yourself. I think this can be solved by pageless design. However, now the challenge becomes a slightly different one: on a pageless design only a component of the page changes leaving most of the page unchanged. Donna Maurer cautions that a key challenge in designing part-page updates is making sure people see them.

I am annoyed on shopping sites when you do a search and they give you only the first few results and you have to page through to find the next set. Some sites now give you the option to see all search results at once (but often they don’t save that setting when you do the next search). I think I would like infinite scrolling or endless pages with no more next page. However this might pose a challenge for bookmarking.

The design approach for pageless designs also needs some shifts in thinking to accommodate the varying content on a page. Wireframes and sitemap approaches are especially challenged. Pages that come alive with rich content and interactivity have been compared to a stage with elements of content become actors telling a story through interaction. Perhaps we should think of pages having "acts"?

Assuming you have figured out your design approach, a next challenge is ensuring proper indexing by search engines.

Exciting possibilities, but lots of work ahead.

Web site search experience

BlogArchive — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 17:39:00 GMT

Posted by : Nandini Nayak, Director, HP.com Site Design & Research

A recent entry on Jonathan Batelle's Searchblog discussed the search history feature on HP.com. The blogger reported that he found this feature useful and recommended that other sites have it.

This got me to thinking that in the quest to find relevant information, users probably often stumble upon features of web user interfaces that enable better findability. In other words, HP informavores are probably foraging for the scent of relevant information!

I thought I should point out another feature that has been in place on HP.com for the last couple of years that supports user intention rather directly. We call this Product quicklinks. When a user enters a product name or number, the quick links feature enables one-click access to the relevant destination page be it a product landing page, a product support page, manuals or supplies. Product quick links have proven to be a very popular convenience feature for HP.com users.

Another findability feature that is becoming increasingly popular is faceted navigation (or advanced search brought to the masses). You can experience it here while shopping for consumer notebooks. The faceted classification scheme that sits behind the concept of faceted navigation has, as one of its founding fathers Ranganathan, a Mathematics professor turned librarian in pre-independence south India. (Being from South India myself, I plan to uncover more about him on my next trip!)

You see faceted navigation on all sorts of eTail sites out there. The question of course is which facets are optimal? Or are the facets uncovered by user tagging going to prove themselves more important?