Archive for sap.com

2011 Online Support Rankings | Why the biggest aren’t always the best

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (0)
Monday, October 17th, 2011

So much for conventional wisdom.

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→

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Categories : POV (point of view), Support
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2011 siteIQ eBusiness Index | Enterprise Software | IBM Software is in, CA.com is out, and Oracle.com is still the biggest of them all.

By Kenna Dian · Comments (2)
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

And the Winner Is…

Overall: Oracle.com
Usability & Effectiveness: IBM Software Group
Content, Features & Capabilities: Oracle.com

 

2011 Enterprise Software Star Rankings

With two companies performing complete site overhauls–and one nudging its site into place over the past year—rankings were bound to change in 2011. So which sites were the major movers and shakers over the past 12 months? Which ones are the sites to watch through 2012? Here’s the rundown from first place to last: Read More→

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Categories : Communities, Design, eSelling, Marketing, Navigation, Search, Strategy, Support, Usability, Website Launches, Website Rankings
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Visions of IBM.com’s grand redesign emerge

By Kenna Dian · Comments (0)
Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

IBM.com Solutions Page 2011With 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→

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Categories : Design, Navigation, Usability, Website Launches
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Launches | The Age of the Home Page

By Kenna Dian · Comments (0)
Monday, June 6th, 2011

Who is updating their home page, how are they doing it—and why it might not matter.

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→

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Categories : Design, POV (point of view), Usability, Website Launches
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SAP.com’s home page re-design re-defines Website architecture

By Kenna Dian · Comments (2)
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

SAP.com Home Page 2011Think you know how to design the perfect home page? Engineer the most efficient Website architecture? Think again. Because SAP.com has changed all the rules of the game.

What would you think if someone told you they could eliminate the first 3 layers of your site? The blizzard of landing pages. Semi-redundant content. Pesky page load times. All of it.

Sounds impossible?  It’s not. Read More→

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Categories : Design, Navigation, POV (point of view), Usability, Website Launches
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The Envelope, Please! The best of the best

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (0)
Thursday, July 8th, 2010

In case you missed my last posts, this is the time when we announce our eBusiness Index rankings. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the Websites that set the standards in the IT industry.

Related research: The eBusiness Index Report.  If you are a siteIQ client or subscriber, click here.

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Categories : Website Rankings
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Website Rankings: Hits, misses & a little bit more

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (0)
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

There are plenty of hits and misses on this year’s roster. My favorites are . . .

In my last post, I shared some info about the top five Websites on the siteIQ eBusiness Index. Here’s my interesting surprises and “oops” list:

Symantec.com’s usability ranks second, and the site misses a “Good Practice” rating by a hair.

Juniper.net and Oracle.com complete the usability top five. Of the two, Juniper.net is most likely to move up a slot and knock CA.com off its perch.

Intel.com aced the online recruiting category and is the only four star (the best) in this category. (OK, so most recruiting zones are a big snooze – but we have to give Intel.com chops for its four star performance).

Services marketing continues to be Nortel.com’s claim to fame; HP.com and IBM.com are still second tier contenders.

Juniper.net hits the high note in the communities category – but Cisco.com and Intel.com also operate four star (the best) communities. (This is another way of saying that the new guys are zipping past community pioneers).

If call to action is your bag, look no further than Cisco.com. It is the only call to action “Best Practice” site on the eBusiness Index.

Newegg.com’s e-commerce capabilities puts it with the big boys: Dell.com & HP.com. Newegg ranks third with four stars (the best) and a “Good Practice” nod.

A couple of new entrants on the 2010 eBusiness Index roster did better than expected.

  • Brocade.com and EMC.com rank 7th and 8th on the usability chart – and finish in the middle of the pack when all of the scores are tallied up (EMC.com ranks 12th; Brocade ranks 14th).
  • Among the sites that debuted on the Index in 2010, Deloitte.com and SAS.com turned out to be boat anchors. Deloitte finished dead last – and SAS.com debuted in 17th place (out of 23 Websites).

Related research: The eBusiness Index Report.  If you are a siteIQ client or subscriber, click here.

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Categories : Website Rankings
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What we learned while lurking on leading communities

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (1)
Friday, July 24th, 2009

Although evaluating 10 leading IT communities based on 490 criteria was a bit of a slog (and pencils out to looking for and scoring 4,900 types of content, features and capabilities, plus another 320 usability metrics), we did have some fun during the process.  While Kenna did the deep diving wearing her “power user” hat, I took a tour through every community with my “lurker beanie” on. The point of the exercise was to see how these communities look to visitors who are looking around to see if they want to join the party versus what’s actually delivered once you’ve married into the family.

It was a bit of a lark, to be sure. And like many of our larks, it delivered some interesting results.

Usability Scores Lurkers vs. MembersTo see why, take a peek at this graph that illustrates how the communities operated by seven leading IT companies fare based on 32 usability metrics.

First, the good news. SAP and Citrix deliver pretty much what is expected. The bad news for Citrix is that, at a 54% usability score, its community doesn’t look very usable – and it isn’t. At the other end of the spectrum, SAP’s communities appear to be the most usable – and (dismal look and feel aside) they are.

Next, let’s look at the sites that exceeded expectations. That would be Dell. My tour of the community delivered Dell an average 69.1% usability score. At 70.8%, Kenna’s power drive says that Dell’s communities actually deliver slightly more than expected.

This leaves us with the communities that are like an unfortunate blind date. Among these, EMC and Oracle fared worst.

My tour of EMC’s communities delivered good, but not great, usability results (62.4%), but Kenna’s deep dive shows that once you get past the flash, this community is almost unusable.

Oracle also seemed to be a reasonably usable venue if you are just lurking around, and my usability scores averaged out to 60.8%. By the time Kenna finished rambling through the site’s inconsistent behaviors and technical problems, she thought 54% was a gift.

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Categories : Communities, Design, POV (point of view), Web 2.0, Website Rankings
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Global Websites | The good, the bad and the (really) ugly

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (2)
Monday, January 12th, 2009

We recently put the finishing touches on our research project to identify how effectively leading IT companies address language requirements on 700+ global Websites operating in 232 countries around the globe. The companies under our microscope include the Who’s Who in enterprise systems (IBM, HP, Dell and Sun), enterprise software (SAP and Oracle), and the networking industry (Cisco and Nortel Networks). Quite frankly, we would have loved to add other major players, such as Microsoft, CA, Symantec, Adobe and others, but at 700 Websites we had our hands full.

The good news is that everyone can learn from the steps and mis-steps of these leading IT vendors.

siteIQ clients have access to our study results in a new siteIQ SnapShot report, Global Websites | Key Metrics | Language Compliance. For those who don’t have access to the siteIntelligence Research Center, I thought I’d share some of the more interesting things we learned.

The Big Picture

The IT industry has come a long way since we last looked at the global landscape in 2005. Then, language compliance in key markets, such as Latin America and Asia Pacific, were hit and miss at best. Today, these regions stand out as having some of the strongest language compliant Websites. Among the companies studied, Dell’s Latin American regional sites are the venues to watch.

In a reprise of our 2005 results, Oracle retains the crown as the worst global language performer.

languagebyregion09On the other end of the spectrum, the emerging market du jour – Eastern Europe – is a language compliance disaster. Here, companies are following a number of less-than-effective strategies.

Those that deliver sites in Russian appear to be unaware that this language is spoken in less than half of the 29 countries in this region. Others, like Oracle, fall back on English-based Websites in a region where English is not a first, second or an official language. None of the companies we studied “get it”, but if you want to see the best of a bad lot, spend some time observing Eastern European sites operated by IBM.

Read More→

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Categories : Global Websites
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Why Web 2.0 is like botox

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (0)
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Web 2.0 is alot like Botox. Expertly applied with pinpoint precision, Web 2.0 can smooth out a Website’s wrinkles and create a better (even great) look and feel.  Slather it on willy-nilly, however, and you’ll end up with gridlock – and a very, very ugly result

I’m at a conference that is a brain trust for Web 2.0 and its ramifications inside corporations – and for public .com Websites.  Ajax, wikis, gadgets, widgets, logs, podcasts and long tails whiz by as speakers extol the virtues and opportunities that Web 2.0 will create.

I’m reminded of the mania surrounding the dotcom era. This is more restrained – a bit more focused – but I still hear the strains of ‘it’s a brave new world’ in the background.

Don’t get me wrong. Web 2.0 is going to change – even revolutionize — how IT sites communicate with visitors and customers. That said, a word of caution is also in order. Web 2.0 is alot like Botox. Expertly applied with pinpoint precision, Web 2.0 can smooth out a Website’s wrinkles and create a better (even great) look and feel.  Slather it on willy-nilly, however, and you’ll end up with gridlock – and a very, very ugly result.

At this point, it seems that the IT Web is dividing in to two Web 2.0 camps: those that intend to be early adopters – and those that are piddling around to very little effect. Of the first set, Cisco.com, Sun.com and IBM.com stand out as early adopters. Of these, Cisco.com is currently the site to watch.

So what should you pay attention to as you navigate the Web 2.0 waters?  Here’s a couple of thoughts: Read More→

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Categories : Web 2.0
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