Through the Eyes of the First Designer
28.Jan.04--The first "Big Design" for sun.com was introduced to the world at a Sun trade show and customer event to be held in San Francisco, Calif. in May 1995, also the official launch of Java technology. The site's design lead was Jakob Nielsen, now a principal at Nielsen Norman, a world-renowned consulting firm devoted to making business Web sites easier to use.
Nielsen says: "Sun launched a huge Sun World event at the Moscone Center, and--almost as a side-event--formally announced the Hot Java browser and the more earth-shattering fact that Netscape was going to incorporate Sun's Java technology into a future version of the Netscape browser."
There on stage, Sun unveiled the new www.sun.com design, complete with interactive Java technology buttons that pulsated and made noise. "Nobody had ever seen anything like it," says Nielsen.
The big design was the culmination of more than a year of continuous evolution in Sun's Web presence. Very early in the history of sun.com, the Web team realized the power of the user interface to give customers simple access to the site's growing resources--discovering how from scratch, by watching and listening to Sun customers as they used Sun's early Web site in a usability lab setting. Many of the early design ideas and usability findings became Internet-wide conventions.
For example, it was clear from user testing that the group needed a way for every page to indicate the user's current location. It was not at all clear whether this should be done through a left-hand-side navigation bar or at the top of the page.
The group came up with a high-level navigation bar at the top with standard icons for universal features like search, and then they put a second navigation bar below to show lower-level location. "While the first attempt was a little primitive," says Nielsen, "the idea of two levels of navigation bars is now quite common for big sites that can't make do with a single navigation bar."
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Jakob Nielsen demonstrates the technique of card sorting to build site structure and information architecture for www.sun.com. Circa 1995.
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Nielsen's early studies discovered simple truths that seem obvious today, but were at the time breakthrough revelations:
- Buttons should look like buttons and be clearly clickable
- Don't make things look clickable if they aren't; in particular don't make text blue unless it's a link
- Prioritize information strictly: users don't have time to read a lot of text
- Write quickly scannable headlines
- Use clean photos without too much detail
- "Under construction" is a bad idea--don't put anything up until it's ready
- Use page design templates to ensure consistency across a big site instead of making up every page design individually
- Offer a "Search" window on every page
- Users easily get lost, so make sure the template indicates the current navigational location
- Systematically construct a hierarchical information architecture based on card sorting
- Cater to international users
"This was at a time when the entire Web was limited to about a thousand sites and e-commerce didn't exist yet," remembers Nielsen. "And some of the early ideas and findings from the sun.com project were very influential. Even though Sun was not always the very first site on the Web with some of these design elements, the way they were combined on sun.com and our desire to design for customer needs, did make Sun's design particularly significant."
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