E-Commerce

• The Redesign of the New Dell.com Home Page

  Wed. Jul. 02, 2008
  by Tommy Lynn, Design Lead—Global Site Design

  To add to Fara’s post about the Dell.com redesign, I wanted to take the opportunity to explain how we design for the 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.

  

  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.

  

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

  Wed. Jul. 02, 2008
  by Fara Howard, Sr. Manager—Global Site Design

  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):

  

  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:

  • Respond to this post
  • Submit an idea at the Dell Web Site area of IdeaStorm or
  • Weigh in at the Community Pulse page for Dell.com
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• Revamped Awards & Reviews Site on Dell.com

  Wed. Jun. 04, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  It's clear from any number of studies out there that customers trust what they hear from friends, family members, or someone they consider and expert more than what they hear from a company. It's also clear that most folks use the Internet to research products quite a bit when they are ready to purchase something like a computer that will be used daily for quite some time.

  Product reviews tend to be a source of information for customers when they are deciding between . Anne B. Camden just published a post to discuss two recent awards for the XPS 420 and XPS 730 desktops. Speaking of awards, yesterday we launched a new Awards & Reviews site on Dell.com. Of course, it features the latest third-party reviews of Dell products, but lots of folks worked to make it more than just a static page with links and logos. Hopefully, one thing you'll notice is that we tried to make it an intuitive visual experience. You can click on specific products if you have already narrowed your search or can see whole categories of systems.

  Beyond that, we wanted to make it more interactive by doing a couple of things: integrating product reviews from customers who own the product and videos from Dell employees who share their opinions of products. Regular readers of Direct2Dell have heard me blog about user ratings and reviews. They are significant because in my mind it represents a small first step in integrating community elements into Dell.com. I've been a big believer in Jeremiah's concept of the Irrelevant Corporate Website. To me, it makes sense that companies that do the best job of blending  customer and community feedback with the traditional e-commerce functionality  that we've all grown accustomed to will have a significant edge over competitors. Though we're still in the early stages of things  and have much work to do, we'll keep working toward that goal.

  

  I hope this site gives you a reason to spend some research time the next time you're looking to buy a system. You can check it out by clicking on the image above or by going to www.dell.com/awards. 
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• FY08 Interactive Year in Review Now Available

  Tue. Jun. 03, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Earlier on Monday, on the heels of our Q1 earnings results, we updated Dell.com with the FY08 Interactive Year in Review. The team behind it started with the FY07 Review and worked added some enhancements. Some of the changes you'll see:

  • A brief Flash video introduction of the Chairman letter from Michael Dell
  • More financial content for for downloading including financial tables and charts
  • Link to Dell's IR blog, DellShares (http://dellshares.dell.com)

  If you want to see more, go to www.dell.com/fy08yearinreview or click on the image below:

  
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• More Customers are Talking

  Mon. Jun. 02, 2008
  by Sean McDonald, Dir.—Dell Community | Conversations

  Last week Bazaarvoice held the inaugural version of its 2008 Social Commerce  Summit. A lot of organizations host Web 2.0 summits with buzzwords, hype new technologies, or try and sell you something. This was different. Bazaarvoice pulled together a mix of customers, partners, and thought leaders—all focused on sharing how user- generated content plays a role in business. And challenging the audience of future ways a customer's voice will improve your business (everything from your company's website, your advertising, and what it means to your employees).

  I caught up with Bazaarvoice's Chief Marketing Officer, Sam Decker, who shared his thoughts with me on this video. I ask him about  the concept of "Customer Oxygen" which illustrates how user generated content can permeate a business and change its culture. Here's  his recap of the event.

  Ze Frank was also onhand to provide his perspective on how companies are now starting to listen and embrace user-generated content. More from him in this video.
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• New Dell.com Home Page

  Thu. Apr. 17, 2008
  by Laura P. Thomas, Global eCommerce

  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.

   

  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 it “missed 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!
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• The Future of Dell in Social Media

  Sun. Mar. 23, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Those of you who have followed Dell's social media journey know that we started these efforts just about two years ago at this time when Michael Dell himself asked our team to find Dell customers in the blogosphere in need of support so we could provide it to them. We've grown a fair amount since then, and I thought this might be a good time to provide a framework for what's coming next.

  Here are four main areas we will continue to focus on as a team. I'll be blogging about various aspects of each moving forward (along with other Dell bloggers) as we start to make inroads against them.

  • More Conversations - This is really about expansion, and you can expect it in two ways: more languages and more group blogs. Focusing on Direct2Dell, many of you already know that we have a few Dell blogs in Chinese, Spanish and Norwegian. There will be more languages coming soon—with Japanese most likely coming next. The other type of expansion is with group blogs. You may already be familiar with the Dell Shares Investor Relations group blog and the Cloud Computing group blog we just launched a couple of weeks ago. By the end of this week, we hope to roll out Inside IT, which will be a group blog about all hardware and software for businesses and corporations—everything from laptops to servers and storage, services, systems management and more. Several other group blogs already lined up after that.
  • Ease of Use - This also applies to things on a couple of fronts. First off, we need to make our social media tools easier to navigate and use. Part of the way we hope to get there is to drive more consistency across our social media properties—we're working on that now. The second part: we need make it easier for you to find information you're looking for. Consistency will help, but this really requires innovative thinking. An example is something we've recently introduced on the Dell Community Forum called Accepted Solutions. I'm pumped because it empowers our customers to show other Forum readers what response fixed their issue in a way that's pretty easy to spot. More on that coming soon.
  • Collaboration - This is bigger than the blog. It encompasses all of our social media properties and then some. Over the past two years, we've built some listening posts that open up lines of communication between Dell and our customers. Many times, we get feedback from customers via monitoring conversations in the blogosphere, on Direct2Dell, the Dell Community Forum or IdeaStorm before they show up in our call centers. But a pipeline for customer feedback is useless if we don't act on that information. Internal collaboration is vital to our long-term success. Without it, we simply won't be able to keep up with the volume of feedback we receive through social media every day. Most importantly though, doing it right will mean a quicker response from Dell to customers whether you're trying to fix a technical issue, or waiting for us to implement a great idea that you have shared through IdeaStorm. There's a lot to this topic... for a bit more background, take a look at Shel Israel's recent post about social software in the enterprise, which was prompted by a software-related post from Dennis Howlett.
  • Community Meets e-Commerce - In my view, all of our efforts in the social media space should empower our customers. Speaking of Dell.com specifically, it's clear that we need to do a better job of giving customers a chance to influence content on the website. I think Jeremiah Owyang's concept of the Irrelevant Corporate website is right on target here. In the past, much of Dell.com focused on mainly on e-commerce activities, while community tools resided in an isolated part of the website. In my view, there should be much tighter integration between community and e-commerce. We've taken some small steps in this direction like introducing ratings and reviews functionality in many countries. More on that in the near future.
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• Server Performance: A Comparison

  Thu. Dec. 20, 2007
  by Armando Acosta, Sr. Manager—PowerEdge Server Team
  Performance is certainly an important element for customers to consider for their server purchases. But with IT budgets under strain and all-too-often being focused on simple management and maintenance of infrastructures, it's important to consider how complete server solutions will deliver increased TCO in data center operations.

  More and more customers tell us they're looking for simplified solutions that:

  • Are fully tested and certified with software OS and application partners,
  • Integrate embedded technologies into the hardware
  • Optimize components for various deployments, environments and workloads
  • Have all these critical elements integrated into the solution before they even leave the factory

  Input from 3^rd party testing services is a key element in measuring that customers use when determining which solution will work best in their environment. Benchmarking provided by industry standard bodies such as the SPEC, BAPCo, TPC and Storage Performance Council help provide objective information that can be used to compare computer platforms, components, operating systems, and specific system configurations.

  That is why we are so proud of recent benchmarks that evaluated performance of business applications showing that Dell outperformed HP, IBM, Fujitsu-Siemens, and Sun.

  #1 server for database: SPECjAppServer2004 - #1 performance with 1950 III and R900; Top Application Server/Database performance for 2 node with Oracle Application 10G.

  #1 server for virtualization: VMmark - #1 performance with 2950 III and R900; Leaders in 2-socket and 4-socket server virtualization performance.

  #1 server for Java: SPECJBB2005 - #1 performance with the R200, 2950 III, and R900; Top Java Based Application performance for 1-socket, 2-socket, and 4-socket servers.

  #1 server for power efficiency: SPECpower - #1 performance/watt for currently shipping systems with the 2950 III; The first industry-standard benchmark that measures power consumption in relation to performance for servers.

  #1 server for price per performance: TPC-E Price/Performance- #1 with the 2900 III; Top performance for on-line transaction processing workloads for database applications.

  The results speak for themselves - we've listened to our customers and what they're looking for in server solutions that are designed to simplify and deliver optimal TCO.

  This is exactly what Simplify IT is all about - delivering solutions that customers know will help them get IT faster, run IT better, and grow IT smarter. When you have the most highly optimized solution for your environment today, more IT budget dollars can go to innovation tomorrow - something every customer likes to hear. Learn more about simplifying your IT.
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• Treehugger's Collin Dunn to Guest Blog on Direct2Dell

  Fri. Nov. 09, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Next week, I'm pleased to welcome Collin Dunn from TreeHugger as our first guest blogger. This will all happen next week in San Francisco at Oracle OpenWorld 2007, where Michael Dell will be one of the keynotes on Wednesday. Collin will be there reporting for TreeHugger (and this won't be just about Dell). He'll post daily on what conference attendees are doing to draw attention to environmental protection and awareness. We hope this content will provide a broad look into what other companies and individuals are doing to address environmental concerns.

  For those in attendance, be sure to drop by the Dell booth at the Eco-Innovation Gallery located at Moscone North, in the Upper Lobby. There you can interact with members of our team and share your environmentally-responsible thoughts and ideas in an unprecedented way. We'll also upload lots of video to Direct2Dell, with a focus on what attendees from across the world are doing to improve our shared Earth.
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• No New Home Page This Year

  Thu. Nov. 08, 2007
  by Laura P. Thomas, Global eCommerce
  Well, the numbers are in from our most recent beta test of a new dell.com home page design, and they're not as I'd hoped. While one researcher recently found our web site to be "quite easy to navigate only after several visits," our beta metrics indicated that changing the home page actually made it harder for returning visitors to find what they were seeking.   

  So, we theorized that if we ran the beta test for a longer period, the return visitors would have time to become more comfortable with the new navigation. Thus, a longer beta run would show return visitor results beginning to level out with new visitor results in both the beta and control groups. However, after re-running the beta for twice as long, control continued to outperform the beta group. 

  We want to make sure that our customers know how to find what they are looking for on dell.com as we head into the holiday shopping season, and these results seem to indicate that the new page does not improve findability. Something  Peter Morville dubbed "one of the most thorny problems in web design." So, we will not launch a new home page until after the end of this year. 
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