The New macromedia.com: An Experience That Simply Works Better
As an experienced web user, you've seen it all.
In the beginning, the web was text and UNIX commands. Then came hyperlinks and browsers. More recently there was every conceivable type of online store, content aggregator, and matchmaking service. Then, it had to be beautiful—eye candy everywhere. If it was possible, someone built it.
Now it's time for the web to deliver on its promise—experiences that are intuitive, relevant, and good business. Experiences that work. Experiences that uniquely express a corporate brand, but don't interfere with visitors' goals.
The story of the new macromedia.com is a story of a focused effort to create such an experience: a Macromedia experience that simply works better. It's a story about the fusion of two goals (each with passionate proponents) and a delicate mixture of thousands of pieces of input, sophisticated web analytics, and the collected experiences of the Macromedia team.
What's in a Goal…or Two?
When we began planning this new version of our website—for sure it's not the last—we knew we needed to achieve two key goals. These goals were not mutually exclusive. However, when we worked to achieve one goal, we often found that we weren't always supporting the success of the second goal. Here's a summary of how we worked toward each goal, and how we made the goals work together.
Goal 1: Smooth, Efficient User Experiences
Our first goal was to absolutely optimize the efficiency and seamlessness of the user experience. Here's how we did it:
- We identified six profiles of users
who visit our site.
For example, there are people who have used macromedia products for a long time. There are visitors who are coming to our site for the first time. They might be new developers or business professionals wanting to take an active role in keeping content fresh on their company website. - We identified the seven most common user tasks.
Why are people visiting, and what do they need? Since thousands of users need to succeed with these tasks every day, we wanted to make them very easy for users to accomplish on macromedia.com. - We combined the profiles and tasks and prioritized them.
We chose to address the 27 most common user/task pairs. Once we had these common "who and what" pairs, we started to unearth more detail on how we would optimize the new site. - We developed user scenarios.
We wrote user scenarios—narratives that describe every explicit and implicit goal that the user might have when he or she arrives at our site. We also considered how a user might prefer to go about achieving those goals. - We tested the new design.
Finally, we tested our design and information architecture against these use cases.
Goal 2: Macromedia MX 2004 Launch
Our second goal was to ensure that the website fully supports the launch of our new Macromedia MX 2004 products.
Macromedia has made an enormous investment in developing new products. Without unified, effective marketing of these new products, our investment in their development would never realize its full potential. We needed to integrate these new products into almost every aspect of the site—by building new product sections, leveraging new product designs, and telling the Macromedia MX 2004 story.
Combining the Goals Our Business and Users
These two goals epitomize the classic business tension between business goals and customer goals. We refused, however, to cave into the classic dilemma of having to choose one over the other.
We wanted the best for our customers and what was best for the company. While we focused on helping customers reach their goals—from an IT manager researching ColdFusion specifications to a consumer downloading the latest player—we also took every opportunity to share our excitement about the new MX 2004 products with these same visitors in appropriate ways.
Reality Check: What We Needed to Know Before We Started
Fusing these two goals together inside a large company is a complex task. It's even more challenging because Macromedia is not just any company. We're a company that makes premier tools for creating websites and communicating ideas. We put a tremendous amount of pressure on ourselves to make sure macromedia.com showcases the best experiences on the web.
Four very important bodies of knowledge influenced all of the necessary decisions to build both goals into the new macromedia.com:
One: Input from Customers
The first body of knowledge that we used was input from customers. Throughout the history of Macromedia, we've integrated customer feedback as we developed our products. For the past several years, customer input has also been a core part of developing our website. Customers participate in extensive usability testing of our website designs, and we also actively seek open-ended feedback from our site visitors. Earlier this year, we publicly engaged our website community in refining the website through a beta process that we launched in March 2003. All of this input was absolutely core to the decisions we made along the way.
Two: Expert Advice
The second body of knowledge we needed was the knowledge of experts. How do people typically scan a page? Do users like sites that are "narrow and deep" or "flat and broad?" These are elements of knowledge that are hard for one company to prototype and test. Experts who spend months and years studying human behavior and reactions to hundreds of different kinds of websites provided invaluable feedback to our web team. Their expertise saved us countless hours we would have spent on the "little" decisions, letting us focus those hours instead on the monumental ones.
Three: Data to Back It Up
The third body of knowledge was web analytics. Since March of 2003, we have used third party software to understand click volumes for every link in our site. If there is an internal debate about which order to present certain choices on a particular page, these statistics help us make a good decision. Without this hard data, debates concerning the redesign might have continued well beyond the launch date! With this data, we add a new level of confidence to our decisions that, when mixed with the other bodies of knowledge, really helps improve the site and the flow.
Four: Our Own Judgment
Finally, we also used a significant amount of experience and judgment. I'm not talking solely about web experience here. We have people on the web team from walks of life as diverse as software development, yacht design, sports apparel marketing, and even football. (Check out my bio, below, for that last one.)
Each of these diverse perspectives adds value to our designs and website architecture. By itself, an individual's personal experience may not be a very good indicator of what the right decision should be. But look at it another way—without personal experience and judgment, data might be misleading and taken out of context. Or an expert’s opinion might be applied to a situation that is very different from the research case that led to the expert's original conclusion.
Once we made our design and architecture decisions, we pressed technology and design into the service of our goals. We broke new ground using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Dreamweaver templates. CSS is really proving itself to be the holy grail of cross-browser presentation and management. CSS is a large part of Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Flash MX 2004, so we want our site to be a reflection of that push, as well. Our entire site is now supported by 12 style sheets, and these style sheets support more than 120 combinations of operating systems, browsers, and hardware platforms. Our site now integrates five Macromedia Flash applications, 18 ColdFusion applications, 110 CGIs, and 8 third-party applications, many of which are localized into 16 languages.
Moving Forward...
Making any changes to our website is a massive undertaking, and not just from a technical perspective. Customers regularly come to our site looking for information, and we need to find a comfortable middle ground between increasing the overall usability and the short-term customer frustration that can come from changing the site architecture. So, we tried to strike a balance there as well. Our goal was to increase the performance and presentation of information, but to preserve as much of the architecture as possible. We also used existing site metrics to determine the way we ordered lists in navigational elements, trying to put users on the quickest path possible from their question to their answer. For many of our customers, site success is judged by how quickly they can leave the site with the information they need. And we always welcome feedback from customers on how we can make the site more effective for your needs.
Send Me an Angel
As part of the MX 2004 launch, Macromedia is delivering a new initiative called Halo, which gives developers an opportunity to provide Internet users with an optimized and consistent rich user experience. Many of the Halo components are packaged as MX Elements that will ship with our new products. So, our own website became the first intersection of using our technical expertise, our goals, our vision, and our new MX 2004 products.
Did It Work?
What happened when we stirred it all together, fusing two goals and four bodies of knowledge? Well, you can see the result. Did it work? You and our other users will be deciding that from this point forward.
We'll measure the success of our business goal—to launch a new set of products—in many ways. To be sure, we'll keep an eye on sales and customer service calls. We'll monitor the feedback that we get from the new Send Feedback link in the global footer of each page. And, of course, we'll track site traffic and analyze every web statistic that we can get our hands on.
The challenge, of course, is to measure how well we achieved the goal of creating a better experience. If we achieve our business goals, then of course, we could conclude that a better experience contributed to that success. But there are too many other factors that drive the achievement of business goals to ever really know what role a better website experience might play.
You can help us get to the bottom of this. Send me feedback about what works or doesn't work for you. What did you want to accomplish but couldn't accomplish? What was a pleasant surprise for you?
Our pursuit of the best experience for our customers is relentless. This new website blends every bit of knowledge we have today….but we'd love to know if we can make it even better!
Send feedback to les@macromedia.com.
About the author Les Schmidt is Senior Vice President of macromedia.com. Les has held top positions on the management teams of four venture-backed companies that all succeeded in becoming public companies. Recently, Les took a two-year hiatus from the start-up world when he served as Chief Operating Officer of the San Francisco 49ers.
Schmidt was instrumental in building several Bay Area companies over the last two decades, including Quokka Sports, The Learning Company, MECON, Inc., and Applied Immune Sciences. He served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Quokka Sports, a digital sports entertainment company that produced real-time coverage of sporting events, with the idea of changing the way fans experienced sports. Quokka gained notoriety by creating and managing the nbcolympics.com website during the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia.
