Design

  • The Redesign of the New Dell.com Home Page

    To add to Fara’s post about the Dell.com redesign, I wanted to take the opportunity to explain how we design for New Dell.com Home Page - Mike Mingthe online user experience here at Dell and provide further insight into ways that Dell is continuing to foster a design-centric environment to benefit our customers.

    Note: Click on any of the images in this post to see larger versions of all of them.

    My team, an internal group of user experience designers, began our redesign efforts back in March with a lot of planning and strategy exploration. During this time we worked closely with internal business partners to define the objectives, requirements, and establish what success looked like to everyone. To build our strategy, we used current-state customer feedback and metrics as well as research and results from our previous design tests. This discovery process illustrated that there were a myriad of design options that we needed to consider.

    Exploring these approaches took a lot of people, time and creative reviews. The initial round of designs included 24 different concepts and over 14 ways to navigate the page. After aligning on the goals for the page, our mission was clear: Beautiful imagery, more targeted navigation, space for fresh content, and more deep links into the site.

    New Dell.com Home Page - Collage

    As we narrowed down the options, we tested the direction with users from our three main customer audiences (Consumer, Small & Medium Business, and Large Business) to ensure that we effectively captured each group’s needs. The feedback from this research informed some important design changes and reaffirmed the final design direction.

    We know that a positive user experience has a direct correlation to a strong brand experience by allowing users to accomplish their goals easily. The end result of our efforts, which now live in the US with a 50% filter, accomplishes this with a clean and simple way to address the needs of our users by getting you where you want to go quicker.

    New Dell.com Home Page - Studio Notebooks

    Like Fara mentioned, we need your help to evolve the online experience at Dell.com. If you have thoughts to share about how to improve, respond to this post, go to the Dell Web Site area of IdeaStorm or weigh in at the Community Pulse page for Dell.com

  • The New Dell.com Home Page: Aiming for Function and Beauty

    After months of customer research, planning, and design, we are ready to share the new home page for Dell.com. A well-designed home page sets the tone for the entire site experience. When we do our job well, you can easily find a product or information that’s important to you. We worked with this goal in mind.

    Getting the home page right is critically important, and that’s why we started our design process with feedback from the community. In her post last year, Laura Thomas discussed findability, load time and customer input. We focused our efforts on all three. When we spoke with customers this spring about the new home page, 100% of people found the ideal path to products. We learned that the imagery resonated with both our corporate, small business and consumer customers. We also focused on load time by building a page that will enable you to experience our products, and not to have to wait to enter the site.

    Through the collective work of many folks on the Dell team, we’ve worked to create a home page that is easy to navigate and that shows off our products. Hopefully, there are a few key things you’ll notice when you experience the new home page on Dell.com (click on the screen shot below to view a larger image):

    New Dell.com Home Page - XPSM1330

    1) Clear navigation: With “For Home, For Office and For Data Center” present at the top of the page, it’s easy for you to find the products that are perfect for your needs.

    2) Focus on products: Technology is a huge part of our life, so we should be buying, carrying and using products that we’re proud to own. The new Dell.com home page highlights our products in a more visual way while clearly calling out the functional benefits that are important to you.

    3) It’s more than just shopping: At Dell, we introduce award-winning products at an rapid pace so we’ve allotted space on our site to tell you about them. We are also bringing technology headlines and Dell Deals to you as you start your dell.com experience.

    We started our launch yesterday in Canada, China, Mexico, Brazil and Spain. The US will started with a limited launch yesterday as well (so all of you won’t see it yet; but you will soon!). Over the course of this month, the design will roll out to other regions.

    We hope that the new Dell.com will be a great experience, starting from your first click. Thank you for all of your feedback—we’re always looking for more. So if you got some ideas on how we can continue to improve, you have several options:

  • Dell Studio 15 and Studio 17 Details

    Jay Pinkert published a post about the new line of Consumer systems we unveiled earlier today. Beyond the blog post, you can also see information on the new line at www.dell.com/studio

    Click on the image below to see a larger version of it, or click here to see more images in Flickr.

    Studio Laptop Colors

  • First to 80 PLUS Silver

    Today, we became the first computer manufacturer to register two 80 PLUS Silver-certified power supplies, the latest milestone in our commitment to design the industry's most energy-efficient technology.

    The 80 PLUS specification aligns to the power-supply requirements in the EPA's Energy Star 4.0 standard for computers and requires the use of 80 percent or more efficient power supplies. 80 PLUS Silver supplies are up to 8 percent more efficient than what's required to meet Energy Star 4.0 compliance and meet the July 2009 qualifications of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative more than a year ahead of schedule. By reaching this efficiency milestone, losses in the PSU have been reduced by about 67 percent in the last three years.

    More than 42 percent of Dell laptops and 57 percent of desktops (consumer and client) introduced since July 20, 2007 offer configurations that meet or exceed Energy Star requirements.

    Today's announcement is an exciting development for the entire Dell team. Energy efficiency isn't about meeting the minimum requirements defined by standards, but rather going beyond to help drive customer savings, avoid millions of tons of CO2 and help industries achieve a low-carbon economy.  Power supply efficiency directly translates into power consumed, and that means utility cost and carbon footprint.  And not just the cost of energy wasted by low-efficiency power supplies but the additional heat load in a home or business created by inefficiency.

    More to come on the energy front soon, but in the meantime I'd like to challenge every computer company to join us in offering 80 PLUS Bronze and Silver power supplies. As our chairman and CEO mentioned on Earth Day, Green IT is key to helping businesses and industries go ‘green' and achieve a low-carbon economy.  Our customers - and shared environment - deserve no less.

  • Community Selects Green Design Winner

    EvolveThe community has weighed in, the votes have been tallied, and at last the wait is over.  A winner has been selected in the ReGeneration: International Green Computing Technology Design CompetitionFive incredibly inventive and environmentally responsible technology designs were recently showcased on the pages of ReGeneration.org, ranging from the fanciful to the practical, and the global online community was invited to discuss them and cast a vote for its favorite.

    After many a spirited debate and over 3,000 votes were cast, the dust finally settled, and Vas Obeyesekere of Point Innovation's PC design, Evolve, emerged the winner.  Every component in Evolve is modular, eliminating the need to replace your computer when the mad pace of technology has rendered it obsolete.  Whether your PC usage requires basic or powerful tasks, Evolve's components can be customized to perform them, and when your computer needs evolve, you simply upgrade the necessary parts and plug it in.  The beauty of the design is in it's simplicity.  Nothing goes to waste, even the box it is shipped in can be used as a display stand, and it is the kind of computer you can imagine both home and business users alike using today.  The insights and inspirations that molded Vas' design philosophy shed some light on the inner workings of the technology design world as a whole.  To hear Vas' thoughts on Evolve and the future of green design, check out ReGeneration's interview with him here (scroll down to the bottom of the post).  A complete list of the other winners and honorees can be found there as well.

    Thanks are due to the judges, internationally respected sustainable design experts all, who sifted through the 185 entries to select just  5 finalists, and to the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) for its endorsement and support.  Without organizations like IDSA, none of this would have been possible.  Finally, we are immensely grateful to all of the participants for their fantastic entries.  While this type of technology could be years away from becoming reality, it represents the creative thinking that will ultimately lead to a greener future.
  • A New Standard for Energy Efficient Computing

    Today we're announcing the latest chapter in our commitment to become the ‘greenest' technology company on the planet. Our laptops and desktops, already among the industry's most energy-efficient, are being designed to consume up to 25 percent less energy by 2010 relative to systems offered today. This is in contrast to Hewlett-Packard's announcement earlier this year relative to its 2005 offerings.

    The energy efficiency of Dell OptiPlex desktops has improved nearly 50 percent since 2005, avoiding an estimated 23 million tons of CO2 in our atmosphere, while Latitude laptops have improved 16 percent since 2006. To achieve our new 2010 goal, we're going to continue to integrate Energy Smart technologies, including circuit designs, fans and power management features. We're also working closely with our suppliers to further develop and deliver energy-efficient components, including chip sets, power supplies and memory.

    Today's announcement isn't just good news for the environment. With greater energy-efficiency comes greater savings for our customers. Our efficient OptiPlex computers have already saved our customers an estimated $2.4 billion dollars since 2005, and these new standards applied across other laptop and desktop lines promise to make that amount grow tremendously. These savings are tracked in real-time at www.dell.com/earth

    Thanks to our customers, we are well on our way to reaching our goal and setting the standard for environmental responsibility within the technology industry. Stay tuned for more updates!

     

  • Dell's XPS 730 Gaming Desktop Details Over at Your Blog

    Update: This time on the Direct2Dell homepage.

     If you're interested in the latest information on the XPS 730, see Anne's post on at Your Blog. If you are a gamer, there's probably some stuff you'll want to see.

    It's got three videos: one that gives an overview of the system, a second all about overclocking and a third that highlights the new H2C cooling system.

    Enough babbling from me... if gaming's your thing, hop on over.

  • New Dell.com Home Page

    When I last discussed our Dell.com home page here, I said that we would not be going forward with the page we had beta tested last year due primarily to an issue with findability. A recent look at HP’s new home page design, however, presents a good opportunity to look at some of the other problems we identified with our test page, and to update you on how we continue to look for improvements to our page.

    If you followed me on Twitter back in February, you might have seen me note some similarities between the design we thought about last year and the one that HP was beta testing at the beginning of this year.

    image 

    I tried to find something about it on HP’s blogs to see what their thought processes were behind the new look. After all, they face the same challenge we do of trying to craft one page to suit a wide variety of customers – from individuals to large corporations. But, the only thing I found in the web design category was a brief note in January that mentioned they were testing the page.

    At least one author on the WebGuild Blog thinks itmissed the mark … by over-designing and foregoing usability.” He noted that the segment navigation panels popup after a delayed mouseover, which is an issue we identified in our beta page as being very annoying to our users. He calls out three links that have no mouseover effect and on mouseover automatically take you to pages without you clicking. We had a similar functionality in our beta page and found that users reacted very negatively to the feeling of being taken to a new page without choosing to do so by clicking.

    He also lists as a negative the fact that the page scrolls down “beneath the fold”. This is still a bit of an ongoing debate in web design, and something Milissa Tarquini at AOL calls a myth. We found from our beta page usability testing that if the main navigation was above the fold, users were “ok” with it. Getting all the main navigation above the fold was very important to our users, however, and was another reason we did not push our last beta design.

    All of these, plus the findability issue led us to make a call to pull back from the direction we were going last year. That didn’t mean we stopped looking for improvements, however. You may have noticed some subtle changes to our current page design. We’ve been adding a bit more color and style variety to the rotating banners, and in the U.S. we are trying the addition of navigation elements that let you control the rotation. These are only minor adjustments, though. The really big stuff is still out there to come.

    We’ve taken the lessons learned last year and started working on new ideas to make it that much easier and faster to navigate from the home page of Dell.com to what you really came for. We’re looking hard at traffic patterns on the current page to make sure the top things our visitors seek can be easily found. And, while segmentation of customers might not go away all together, we are trying new ideas to simplify it for you and make it as invisible as possible.

    The feedback you gave us last year spoke clearly against some of the design elements that HP’s new page incorporates. Rather than follow the competition, we will keep our focus on what our customers tell us they want. Watch for a chance to provide input on something totally new soon!

  • New Graffiti Contest from ReGeneration and Facebook

    Over at ReGeneration.org, we just launched a follow-up to the “What Does Green Mean to You” Graffiti contest on Facebook.  The theme of the new global contest will step beyond ”What Does Green Mean to You?” and head to the next step: what actually “Going Green" means.  We’ve evolved the categories by which the entries will be judged to get some different responses.

    The new categories are:

    • Best Overall
    • Most Inventive Green Technology
    • Sustainable Architecture
    • Most creative vision of a green future
    • Show us how you can improve the environment now

    After the submission round is complete, users will vote on their favorite entries.  The deadline to submit entries will be Monday, April 14, and user voting will begin the next day and end the following Monday, April 21st.  A panel of judges will decide on the winners from of the entries receiving the most votes.  The winner in the “Best Overall” category will receive a Green Dell Inspiron laptop!  The other category winners will receive Dell backpacks.  The winners will be announced on Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22.  Be sure to explain your art in words when prompted because another Green Insprion will be awarded to the entry with the best overall text.

    Sign up for the ReGeneration movement while you’re at it.  There's a cool new section on the site called Café Re which encourages dialogue and self-expression…you can chat with others participating in the contest and view the latest art being submitted by Graffiti users across the globe. Like Dane mentioned in his recent post, look for this image on the right hand section of the ReGeneration.org site to join. Clicking on the image below will take you to the main site:

    On a related note, a long time ago, I had seen this post from Shel Holtz where he reacted to a report that many companies block employees from Facebook and other social media sites. We were one of those companies until last week. Now, we can open up this contest to Dell employees worldwide.  

    ReGeneration's challenge to us: Share your ideas about what going green really means through graffiti, text and Cafe Re's new live chat. Exchange thoughts with other participants by posting in the comments section.  The world will be watching.

  • Dell: 10 Years in China

    Michael Dell recently visited China last week. Some of you may have seen reports in the blogosphere about some things he discussed. For a bit more context, I thought it made sense to share Amit Midha's recent Direct2Dell Chinese post on our English site as well. Here's Amit's post.

    Amit Midha
    Dell Greater China President

    2008 is a unique and important year for China since it will host the Olympics Games. 2008 is a unique and important year for Dell China as it marks our 10th anniversary in China and we will turn into a new chapter of our growth and development in China.

    Last week, our Chairman & CEO Michael Dell visited China and kicked off our 10th anniversary celebration in China by announcing extensions of the company’s educational and environmental initiatives in the country.

    Dell will invest RMB 1.7 million to equip six more Dell Learning Centers (DLC). The centers are helping rural migrant children bridge the technological gap to the Internet-based Connected Era. By the end of the year, Dell will have initiated 10 DLCs in China. The first three new centers are scheduled to open in April and May in Tianjin, Hangzhou and Chengdu. Each center will feature Dell’s leading computer systems paired with education software, which Dell volunteers and others will use to help train children on how to use information technology.

    Additionally, Dell will donate RMB 1 million to support the “greening” of the Chao Yang district of Beijing as part of the Company’s global Regeneration initiatives (www.regeneration.org). The entire amount will go toward planting trees and maintaining green areas in the area.

    Dell began operations in China in 1998. Since then, the company’s business here has expanded to include:

    • Two manufacturing operations in Xiamen -- one for mainland China, and one for export to Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong;
    • An enterprise command center, also in Xiamen, to provide rapid support services to customers with large computer networks;
    • A global design center in Shanghai, one of Dell’s largest such centers outside the United States, and;
    • A sales and support center in Dalian for customers in Japan and South Korea.

    Dell’s economic presence in China is significant. Last year the company purchased about US$18 billion in technology components and related products from supplier partners in China—more than any other computer-systems company. Dell expects that number to grow to US$23 billion this year. Based on projections from a 2005 Peking University study, the company estimates its spending in the country this year to contribute more than US$50 billion to China’s gross domestic product and support more than two million jobs.

    Dell’s contributions to China are not only economic. In 2007, Dell employees volunteered more than 7,000 hours and the company donated RMB 5 million to charities in the country and to promote the informatization of the country.

    The learning center and green initiatives in China announced by our Chairman and CEO are just the latest examples of myriad programs in countries worldwide that have earned Dell repeated recognition for its social responsibility and are the beginning of the celebration of our 10th anniversary in China.

    Stay tuned.

    QA_Michael Dell(1) (2)  Keynote_Michael Dell(2)

    QA_Michale Amit(2)

    戴尔中国开启十周年庆典

    戴尔公司大中华区总裁闵毅达

    随着中国举办奥运会的步伐越来越近,2008年对中国将是非凡而重要的一年。同样,2008年对戴尔中国来说也是不同寻常的一年,我们将迎来在中国的十周年,掀开在华持续增长和发展的新篇章。

    上周,戴尔公司董事长兼首席执行官迈克尔•戴尔访问了中国,宣布将在中国积极开展一系列有益的教育和环保项目,拉开了戴尔中国十周年庆典活动的帷幕。

    戴尔将再增资170万元人民币成立六家新的戴尔学习中心(DLC),致力于帮助缩小农民工子弟与互联网时代之间的数字鸿沟。截至今年年底,戴尔在中国的学习中心总数将达到10家。新增的6家学习中心中的前三家将在今年4、5两月分别落户天津、杭州和成都。每个中心都配备了戴尔领先的计算机系统及相应的教育软件,而且来自戴尔和社会各界的志愿者还将义务为学生提供培训。

    另外,作为戴尔全球“绿色革新”(www.regeneration.org)项目的一部分,戴尔公司将捐赠100万元人民币支持北京市朝阳区的绿化建设,全部资金将用于园区的植树和养护工作。

    戴尔在中国开展业务始于1998年。十年来,公司在中国的业务规模持续扩大:

    · 两家位于厦门的制造工厂,一家面向中国大陆市场,另一家出口到日本、韩国和中国香港地区;

    · 企业服务指挥中心,同样位于厦门,负责为拥有大规模计算机网络的客户提供快速支持服务;

    · 位于上海的中国设计中心,是戴尔在美国之外的全球最大的产品设计中心之一;

    · 位于大连的戴尔国际服务中心,负责为日本和韩国客户提供服务。

    戴尔对中国的经济贡献有目共睹。去年,公司从中国采购了价值180亿美元的部件和配件,采购额位居所有计算机厂商之首。戴尔预计今年的采购额将增至230亿美元。基于北京大学针对2005年戴尔对中国经济贡献所进行的研究和报告,戴尔公司预估今年公司在中国的直接和间接业务将为中国创造超过500亿美元的GDP,提供近200万个工作机会。

    戴尔对中国的贡献不仅体现在经济层面。2007年,戴尔中国员工累计贡献了长达7,000多个小时的志愿服务,公司为中国慈善机构和信息化事业捐款总计500万元人民币。

    长期以来,戴尔在全球各地积极实施了大量的社会公益项目,赢得了社会各界的广泛赞誉。此次宣布开展的学习中心和绿化项目,揭开了戴尔中国十周年庆典的帷幕,同时再度体现了我们对企业社会责任的高度重视。

    请拭目以待!

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