Overall: IBM Global Services
Usability & Effectiveness: IBM Global Services
Content, Features & Capabilities: Accenture.com
The ripples of IBM.com’s latest site redesign reached the professional services segment this year and has rocked Accenture.com’s first place ranking. The question now is whether or not the tide will turn in 2012. Here’s the rundown from first place to last: Read More→
For the most part, I’d rather have a root canal than use most support Websites.
Search for information and you end up with a list of a bazillion documents with truncated descriptions that read like Sanskrit.
Want to take a different path? Try ferreting your product out of a laundry list of every product the company ever made.
Or try the “follow our logical links” scenario—where you end up drilling to China.
At the end of all of this wonderfulness is the real insult. Support content that either requires an engineering degree to understand—or a wad of general purpose instructions that dance around the problem and miss the issue by a country mile. Read More→
Overall: IBM.com
Usability: IBM.com
Content, Features & Capabilities: HP.com
But the siteIQ eBusiness Index is always about more than just rankings, ratings, and numbers. So what’s the story about what happened over the past 12 months? Here’s the rundown from first place to last: Read More→
With some best practices and innovations in store.Recently Marty Gruhn and I put IBM.com’s new mega-menu under the microscope and the results were…well…less than stellar. But a couple accidental slips of my cursor exposed some other new designs and approaches that are well worth taking a spin around the IBM.com site.
Navigation first, content second. If you click on one of the artfully hidden “all” links in IBM.com’s mega-menu (i.e. “all solutions” or “all services”) you will land on a page that is so simply designed and elegant that you will think you landed on a different site. You didn’t. This is the highest of the high levels of the new IBM.com. Sophisticated design aside, what is most notable is how the page is focused solely on navigating to the rest of the site. Broad, big-bucket links take visitors to more specific information, while the content only sets the context. Read More→
In this Don’t Miss/Don’t Bother we take IBM.com’s new mega-menu for a spin (or two).Fair warning, this post is long!
IBM.com has launched revised home and solutions pages that feature the next major piece in its evolution: a new take on mega-menus. Not surprisingly, IBM.com has put its own spin on what is fast becoming an industry norm. In this Don’t Miss/Don’t Bother we weigh in on the pros and cons of IBM.com’s latest design. Read More→
When Cisco.com launched its mega-menu last year it set the best practice bar—and it was high. The mega-menu provided greater access into a large (and sometimes unwieldy) site. Its design was easy to scan and use. And, it was also attractive—which is no small feat in a small space. In the siteIQ blog Cisco launches drop down mega menus & fat footers, we applauded the design and architecture of its Product and Services menu. This post welcomes the Support menu into the best practice fold. Read More→
2011 is turning out to be the age of the home page. We’re seeing updates in record numbers– and some designs are actually breaking new ground. On the other hand, few of these designs are actually making it down to lower levels of the site—which is a big no-no in our book.
I’ll leave that point for a future rant. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at who’s producing these new home pages, the important design points and strategies they bring to the party—and explore the age-old question: why only the home page?
I’ll start with the “who” and “how” and leave my humble opinions for the end. Read More→
Kenna posted four new case studies last week – all around IBM.com’s Smarter Planet zone and the new “cult of personality” we see on this site. If you haven’t spent some quality time on this piece of IBM.com real estate, it’s time to dust your dancing shoes off and go for a spin.
Each of the case studies focuses on a different design or content best practice—but for my money, the “cult of personality” discussion is a compelling moment of brilliance. It looks like the IBM Smarter Planet team has actually cracked the code on how to marry social media behaviors with the company’s core business propositions. Here’s a thirty second summary of Kenna’s POV.
I don’t talk about Oracle.com much. In fact, I speak about them so little that one would be lead to believe that I hold a grudge against them. Sure, they unceremoniously erased one of the best enterprise systems sites from the Internet–Sun.com. But, I won’t hold that against them. No, I don’t write about them much for one reason:
My Mother taught me if you don’t have something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything at all.
There’s a litany of issues I have with Oracle.com ranging from design to innovation (or rather a lack thereof). But today, my rant is about Oracle.com’s content. Read More→
Real people, real voices, real timeWhile the SMB & mid-size market are using social media to just get their name out to the masses, large companies are learning how to use social media & communities in tandem for a whole new purpose. And it is literally changing the face of IT.
Large IT companies don’t need to get their name out there. I mean, who doesn’t know IBM, HP, Apple, or Dell? I would bet that even your grandmother knows the name of one of these companies, even if she doesn’t know how to use a mouse. So, aside from using social media as a slick press release system, how do large companies use these outlets to their advantage?
