davidhatch

Hi all,
Since there has been some buzz about the performance of adobe.com, I wanted to post a statement on the matter from some folks on the team who have been working on the issue. See below:

Traffic to www.adobe.com has grown enormously during the last year, and at peak times site performance has suffered as a result. The www.adobe.com team places a very high priority on site performance. Additional monitors have been installed to track site performance, and there have been multiple initiatives under way that have been incrementally restoring the site to the expected high standard. These initiatives have included the addition of new servers, web server and load balancer tuning, JVM tuning, and content optimization.

North America traffic is served out of a facility in San Jose, California and the rest of the world is served from Dublin, Ireland. Many of the improvements were tested in the San Jose facility first, and these same improvements are being rolled out to the Dublin facility over the next couple of weeks. These hardware and software changes to Dublin will result in significant performance gains around the world.

Posted by David Hatch at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I went to a BayChi meeting last night with my web UE team. The title of the talk was "Hello Morae, Farewell VHS!" by Emily Hebard and Joanna Sim from Intuit. The talk was good and I learned a bit about Morae. But for some reason I had got it into my head that Morae could be used for remote user testing (with the users being remote as opposed to just the viewers). It was my bad basically for not doing the research.

What my team and I really want to start doing is remote user testing. I've heard a bit about Ethnio, which looks quite promising for what we want to do here for adobe.com. Also there is a lot of customizing that can be done to Breeze to gear it up for use in remote user testing. So there are things out there that can help us.

More than anything, what I would want out of a remote user testing is just to allow users to click through a proposed experience on their own without anyone "watching". The session would be recorded and include mouse click data and other actions/events. In addition the user would fill out a brief questionnaire related to the experience they just had. They would be compensated in some manner and they'd be on their way. Then, all the data would be magicked to a central repository where a user experience professional could browse at will. Something like this would really ease the overhead of running testing. Over the next month or so the Web User Experience team will begin to explore and try out various methods of creating a persistent, predictable, and actionable input stream from site users (how's that for a mouthful of mumbo jumbo...).

If anyone reading this has had experience with remote user testing of web sites, I'd love to hear about it.

Posted by David Hatch at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I wanted to talk a little bit about the new Adobe.com web site which launched April 30th. This event also coincides with the permanent retirement of the Macromedia.com web site. Quick note for all those sentimental types out there, me included (as I worked on many macromedia.com site launches during my 9 year tour of duty for that company): don't get out your violins yet as many of the best practices from both sites are reincarnated in the new one. All the content from the former macromedia.com site is now part of Adobe.com. If for some reason you can't find something please let me know.

Goals and Objectives of "Day Next”

The basic idea was to create a "one company experience” for the web site. Where there used to be two sites, now there is one. We also wanted to achieve a level of technical efficiency by creating a single production environment where before we had two (but I will leave it up to others to write about this). I have been concentrating on the user experience aspect so I will focus more on that in this entry.

Elements of the "Day Next" User Experience

With respect to the user experience we wanted to create a common experience for users as they navigated across the site (as compared to pre-“Day Next” where we maintained separate sites and user the experience moving between them was quite jarring). The way we accomplished this is below.

1. New UI for combined site sections.
   We created merged site sections where before there were 2:
   • Single homepage
   • Single global navigation  
   • Single key site section for each area of overlap between the two sites (ex: support, search, store, company, showcase, solutions, etc)
     
     
2. Page migration prioritized by user traffic
   Migrate high level pages based from Adobe.com into Dreamweaver templates affording us 100% control over layout using CSS (all Macromedia.com pages were already in the templates. The algorithm we used to determine which pages we should make it to the migration list is below.

   Algorithm for Page Migration

   • Primary Rules
     • Top 90% of traffic (page X is in the top 90% of traffic)
     • Strategic areas (page/section X is very important to the company)
     • High level pages (page X is linked from the global nav or home page)
       
       
   • Corollary Rules
     • User flow continuity (page Y is the next click from a page X)
     • Section cohesiveness (Page Y is in part of a page X's section)
       
       
3. "Light Touch" reskinning of non-migrated pages
   Reskinned all remaining pages of Adobe.com that did not fit into the above migration algorithm so at the very least they had the same global nav, were centered within the browser window, and had some minor style updates to them. We did this to promote continuity of site experience.

(EDs) Experiential discontinuities we know about

• EDs that hurt: Travelling to untouched old adobe.com pages will result in the appearance of the old adobe.com global nav... ouch that hurts (we know). We are working to convert those pages as we speak.
  
  
• EDs that annoy: Travelling from pages in new templates to "light-touched" pages will result in your local nav (side nav) jumping from right to left... ouch we know that hurts, too. We are working to convert these pages as well. We promise!
  
  
• EDs that perplex: Sometimes you may get to a page that appears to indicate we forgot that Macromedia is no longer exists. If you ever stumble across a page like this (you'll know it when you see it), we apologize and are working on it.
  

There undoubtedly are weird experiences out there that we don't know about due to the hazards of working on a site with over 300,000 pages, some of which have existed since time immemorial. In the case you do stumble upon something strange, please let us know.

Much more work ahead

While there is clearly much more effort ahead, the "Day Next" project represents the first major step in creating a single website that serves the combined users of both previous sites. Did we do a good job? You, of course, will ultimately be the judge of that.

If you have comments, concerns, positive feedback (we humans like to hear the good stuff too), please let us web team folk know.

Send feedback to webfeedback@adobe.com.

David Hatch
Chief Information Architect
Adobe.com
May 2, 2006

Posted by David Hatch at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The "Day 1" macromedia.com web site has arrived! The "Day 1" site is how we've been referring to the modified macromedia.com web site that would go live once Macromedia became "the company formerly know as…". Which is now! As the chief info architect for the web site I wanted to have the chance to explain some of the things we did and why.

Design goals for Day 1 Web Site

(1) Ease transition pains for users
We knew we had to make some changes to macromedia.com to communicate to folks that we are now Adobe. But we were concerned that making any drastic changes to the web site would hurt our regular visitors and customers (or at least inconvenience them, which is the same thing). Ever since one fateful redesign many years ago, we've been chanting "evolution, not revolution" every time a redesign comes due. So our number one design goal for the Day 1 macromedia.com web site was "do no harm". We wanted to allow developers and others who use the site on a regular basis to easily get to information and resources they use regularly (dev center, support, forums, downloads, Labs, etc).

(2) Answer the important question: what about me?
We also anticipated that folks would have concerns and questions about their products ("are you still going to support <ProductName>?") and their relationship with us. So we wanted to provide easy site-wide access to acquisition information that would help answer these questions.

(3) Allow easy cross-travel
We know that many of our customers use both Macromedia and Adobe products And that many are regular users of both sites. For the "Day 1" web site we wanted to create a convention for crosslinking that would allow easy access to and from each company's web site in places where it made sense. Some examples are the home pages for support, products, downloads, and solutions.

(4) Provide contextual help
The convention we used for crosslinking not only gets the user to the parallel area on the other web site, it also provides contextual help where relevant. For example on the support home the crosslinking pod contains: "Have questions about how this affects your support? Learn more �.

Elements of the Day 1 Web Site

The following represent the themes that you will see as you click through macromedia.com and adobe.com

Maintain Separate Homepages for macromedia.com and adobe.com
In the early stages of Day 1 planning, an idea was floated to have a single homepage. In other words, when you typed in www.macromedia.com we would redirect you to a modified Adobe home page. However, when we considered our number 1 design goal of minimizing user transition pain we decided that for Day 1 we would not introduce this radical change. Instead we kept each company's homepage as is, with some reskinning for macromedia.com.

Adobe.com and Macromedia.com Homepages

Reskin Macromedia.com
We decided to reskin all of macromedia.com slightly to communicate the company change. Every page in the macromedia.com site now has a slightly modified look and feel which also includes the Adobe logo. I will let Neil Straghalis, our design and production manager, describe the details behind the visual design and CSS implementation. See Neil's blog for details. The nice thing about the reskin is that it sends a strong message while not messing with any user flows.

Global Nav Bar Tweak
We replaced the Macromedia logo with the Adobe logo (wow, nothing says change like a new logo on your site). Since we knew many users would be startled by this change we also included the "formerly Macromedia" part as well as links to both sites and a link to the acquisition info.

Macromedia.com Global Nav Bar

Acquisition Info Center
This site section was created to answer user questions related to the acquisition. This section is linked to from every page of the macromedia.com site via the "acquisition info" link in the global nav.

Acquisition Center on Adobe.com

Crosslinking Pod
We created a convention for linking over to the Adobe web site that we included on many keep pages throughout the site. An example of this convention on the macromedia.com Support Center is shown below. Each crosslinking pod has 2 main elements: a crosslink to a parallel spot on the other web site and a link to the acquisition information. In addition, some have additional contextual help. In the case of support below, we also added a link to a specific page that discusses how the acquisition affects your support.

Crosslinking Pod on the Macromedia.com Support Center

Crosslinking Pod on the Adobe.com Support Center

Redirects
In the "company" section of the site we decided to implement redirects. It makes sense, since Macromedia as a corporate entity now ceases to exist. So when you type in www.macromedia.com/macromedia/ or click "Company" in the macromedia.com global nav, you get redirected to the Adobe company home: www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/. That way you can get to the new info regarding corporate contacts, exec info, investor info, and more.

What Happens Next?