Today was the the halfway mark to a rather intense project that i have been working on.
About every 3 months, like most Laptop manufacturers, Toshiba refresh their laptop range and models. Today was the refresh of our Satellite, Satellite Pro and Qosmio laptops.
So, what does that mean to the web team at Toshiba?
Well every 6 months or so, possibly longer, we are given the task of improving the user experience of, what we call, the ‘Category Pages’ – but as an end user you will know of them as the ‘Home Computing” or “Business Computing” pages as advertised from the homepage. Laptops Homepage
If you click on the above link, you’ll notice the 2 large banners, one with…. well ‘Home Computing’ on it, and the other… yes you’ve guessed it ‘Business Computing’. Now this isn’t a tutorial on how the use the site, as its my job to make sure this is self explanatory. However, I wanted to shed some light on exactly what the process is in creating this new User Journey for the Toshiba Laptops sites, as i think its pretty remarkable – and i work for them 
Now, without releasing any confidential information about Toshiba’s website systems, I wont talk about the technicalities of the systems. However, all I will say, is like many large corporation sites, we use a CMS system for our sites. In Toshiba’s case, the CMS controls over 30 sites. You’ll notice that each Toshiba laptop site sits on a sub-domain off Toshiba-europe.com. So for example, the UK site sits on a UK folder, the Irish site sits on a IE folder and the French site sits on an ….. you’ve guessed it…an FR folder.
Now I look after the UK, IE and the 4 ND sites – NO, SE, FI and DK – so when designing a new user journey for Toshiba, we have to take 6 sites, and 5 languages into account.
“So what!” I hear you ask…..
Well, let me give you an example of how a simple thing like the human language can cause big design issues. If we create a promotional banner on the 6 sites, and the phrase “Buy great laptops from Toshiba” is 30 characters long. Now lets say that the page design you’ve finalised and approved has accommodated for a banner that allows this phrase to sit perfectly on the page. You then spend the next week converting the design in XHTML/CSS and creating 5 site templates – UK, IE, FI, SE and NO. However, you then get to the Danish site and add in that phase into the banner only to discover that the translation is just under 40 characters – “Køb store bærbare computere fra Toshiba”. Any designer will tell you that an extra 10 characters is a big issue when designing something.
With that in mind, we have to design a journey that accommodates for 6 countries….. quite a task I’m sure you’d appreciate.
So who is involved in the design stage?
Well, that would be the project manager and the designer/agency that we use. In this case, the PM was me, and the agency was Mason Zimbler (MZL) – who i will say, without giving them too much of a big head, are incredible at design. I don’t know the designer/s names/s however, hats off to him/her/them.
How long does a redesign like this take?
How long is a piece of string…..? It really does depend on what objectives we set. On this occasion we wanted to reduce the amount of clicks a user takes to find a product. We wanted to show case more information to the user, but in less space. Finally, we wanted a cleaner design. With that in mind, the planning process took about a month, the design too about a month and the build and launch of the design took a further month.
3 months to redesign some pages… are you mad?
If you were thinking that, stop – you’re embarrassing yourself.
Remember, there are 6 sites involved. This actually means there is over 160 pages to build – 28 per site. In this particular case, MZL designed the templates, 5 in total, and i built the pages myself. Now, don’t get me wrong, as there are only 5 templates, there is a number of copying and pasting for some of the templates, especially for the two English speaking countries. However, as there are 5 countries involved, every single page needs to be manually edited, not only to add in the content, but to reposition elements due to the language issue mentioned above.
Now to put this into perspective….. Lets say for instance you opened up each page in dreamweaver, one by one, and closed it after 5 minutes. Clearly each page needs more than 5 minutes work, but stay with me for a moment. So you’ve gone through each page one by one and kept each one open for 5 minutes – this would mean that to do this simple task would take you over 14 hours, that’s just under 2 working days.
Now, i’d rate myself as an expert when it comes to HTML/XHTML/CSS and have been writing code and building sites/pages for well over 10 years, and can obviously hand write code and can touch type. However, lets say for instance that an average developer was creating these pages and spent about an hour on each page. That’s 168 hours of work, that’s 7 WHOLE days of work or 21 workings days or a whole month. Just bragging now aren’t i But to sum up, its a lot of work… it actually only took me a week, however I dont like to gloat.
Who is involved in approving a launching the pages?
Well at Toshiba we have several people involved in approving and launching the pages. Firstly, the product managers provide all of the technical content to the marcoms team. The marcoms team then take the technical jargon and make it more user friendly, they then give that to the web team to add into the pages. The product marketing executives then provide the pricing to the web team to add to the products. Once all content and pricing is added to the pages, the Product managers, Marcoms and marketing manages then check all the pages for final sign off. Once this is done, ALL the pages are then reviewed to make sure they met the first brief. Then my boss gives me the final say so to upload all the pages to the 6 sites. This process alone can take weeks to do – I’m sure you can appreciate that a site like Toshiba’s needs to be picture perfect and even the best designers/developers can miss a typo or a pixel alignment issue, so these rounds of approval are vital.
Take a look at the site today and let me know your views and thoughts on the new user journey – If you a consumer your journey starts here – Home Laptops – If your a business user, your journey starts here – Business Laptops
