E-Commerce

• New Dell.com Home Page

  Thu. Apr. 17, 2008
  by Laura P. Thomas, Global eCommerce

  When I last discussed our Dell.com home page here, I said that we would not be going forward with the page we had beta tested last year due primarily to an issue with findability. A recent look at HP’s new home page design, however, presents a good opportunity to look at some of the other problems we identified with our test page, and to update you on how we continue to look for improvements to our page.

  If you followed me on Twitter back in February, you might have seen me note some similarities between the design we thought about last year and the one that HP was beta testing at the beginning of this year.

   

  I tried to find something about it on HP’s blogs to see what their thought processes were behind the new look. After all, they face the same challenge we do of trying to craft one page to suit a wide variety of customers – from individuals to large corporations. But, the only thing I found in the web design category was a brief note in January that mentioned they were testing the page.

  At least one author on the WebGuild Blog thinks it “missed the mark … by over-designing and foregoing usability.” He noted that the segment navigation panels popup after a delayed mouseover, which is an issue we identified in our beta page as being very annoying to our users. He calls out three links that have no mouseover effect and on mouseover automatically take you to pages without you clicking. We had a similar functionality in our beta page and found that users reacted very negatively to the feeling of being taken to a new page without choosing to do so by clicking.

  He also lists as a negative the fact that the page scrolls down “beneath the fold”. This is still a bit of an ongoing debate in web design, and something Milissa Tarquini at AOL calls a myth. We found from our beta page usability testing that if the main navigation was above the fold, users were “ok” with it. Getting all the main navigation above the fold was very important to our users, however, and was another reason we did not push our last beta design.

  All of these, plus the findability issue led us to make a call to pull back from the direction we were going last year. That didn’t mean we stopped looking for improvements, however. You may have noticed some subtle changes to our current page design. We’ve been adding a bit more color and style variety to the rotating banners, and in the U.S. we are trying the addition of navigation elements that let you control the rotation. These are only minor adjustments, though. The really big stuff is still out there to come.

  We’ve taken the lessons learned last year and started working on new ideas to make it that much easier and faster to navigate from the home page of Dell.com to what you really came for. We’re looking hard at traffic patterns on the current page to make sure the top things our visitors seek can be easily found. And, while segmentation of customers might not go away all together, we are trying new ideas to simplify it for you and make it as invisible as possible.

  The feedback you gave us last year spoke clearly against some of the design elements that HP’s new page incorporates. Rather than follow the competition, we will keep our focus on what our customers tell us they want. Watch for a chance to provide input on something totally new soon!

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• The Future of Dell in Social Media

  Sun. Mar. 23, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Those of you who have followed Dell's social media journey know that we started these efforts just about two years ago at this time when Michael Dell himself asked our team to find Dell customers in the blogosphere in need of support so we could provide it to them. We've grown a fair amount since then, and I thought this might be a good time to provide a framework for what's coming next.

  Here are four main areas we will continue to focus on as a team. I'll be blogging about various aspects of each moving forward (along with other Dell bloggers) as we start to make inroads against them.

  • More Conversations - This is really about expansion, and you can expect it in two ways: more languages and more group blogs. Focusing on Direct2Dell, many of you already know that we have a few Dell blogs in Chinese, Spanish and Norwegian. There will be more languages coming soon—with Japanese most likely coming next. The other type of expansion is with group blogs. You may already be familiar with the Dell Shares Investor Relations group blog and the Cloud Computing group blog we just launched a couple of weeks ago. By the end of this week, we hope to roll out Inside IT, which will be a group blog about all hardware and software for businesses and corporations—everything from laptops to servers and storage, services, systems management and more. Several other group blogs already lined up after that.
  • Ease of Use - This also applies to things on a couple of fronts. First off, we need to make our social media tools easier to navigate and use. Part of the way we hope to get there is to drive more consistency across our social media properties—we're working on that now. The second part: we need make it easier for you to find information you're looking for. Consistency will help, but this really requires innovative thinking. An example is something we've recently introduced on the Dell Community Forum called Accepted Solutions. I'm pumped because it empowers our customers to show other Forum readers what response fixed their issue in a way that's pretty easy to spot. More on that coming soon.
  • Collaboration - This is bigger than the blog. It encompasses all of our social media properties and then some. Over the past two years, we've built some listening posts that open up lines of communication between Dell and our customers. Many times, we get feedback from customers via monitoring conversations in the blogosphere, on Direct2Dell, the Dell Community Forum or IdeaStorm before they show up in our call centers. But a pipeline for customer feedback is useless if we don't act on that information. Internal collaboration is vital to our long-term success. Without it, we simply won't be able to keep up with the volume of feedback we receive through social media every day. Most importantly though, doing it right will mean a quicker response from Dell to customers whether you're trying to fix a technical issue, or waiting for us to implement a great idea that you have shared through IdeaStorm. There's a lot to this topic... for a bit more background, take a look at Shel Israel's recent post about social software in the enterprise, which was prompted by a software-related post from Dennis Howlett.
  • Community Meets e-Commerce - In my view, all of our efforts in the social media space should empower our customers. Speaking of Dell.com specifically, it's clear that we need to do a better job of giving customers a chance to influence content on the website. I think Jeremiah Owyang's concept of the Irrelevant Corporate website is right on target here. In the past, much of Dell.com focused on mainly on e-commerce activities, while community tools resided in an isolated part of the website. In my view, there should be much tighter integration between community and e-commerce. We've taken some small steps in this direction like introducing ratings and reviews functionality in many countries. More on that in the near future.
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• Server Performance: A Comparison

  Thu. Dec. 20, 2007
  by Armando Acosta, Sr. Manager—PowerEdge Server Team
  Performance is certainly an important element for customers to consider for their server purchases. But with IT budgets under strain and all-too-often being focused on simple management and maintenance of infrastructures, it's important to consider how complete server solutions will deliver increased TCO in data center operations.

  More and more customers tell us they're looking for simplified solutions that:

  • Are fully tested and certified with software OS and application partners,
  • Integrate embedded technologies into the hardware
  • Optimize components for various deployments, environments and workloads
  • Have all these critical elements integrated into the solution before they even leave the factory

  Input from 3^rd party testing services is a key element in measuring that customers use when determining which solution will work best in their environment. Benchmarking provided by industry standard bodies such as the SPEC, BAPCo, TPC and Storage Performance Council help provide objective information that can be used to compare computer platforms, components, operating systems, and specific system configurations.

  That is why we are so proud of recent benchmarks that evaluated performance of business applications showing that Dell outperformed HP, IBM, Fujitsu-Siemens, and Sun.

  #1 server for database: SPECjAppServer2004 - #1 performance with 1950 III and R900; Top Application Server/Database performance for 2 node with Oracle Application 10G.

  #1 server for virtualization: VMmark - #1 performance with 2950 III and R900; Leaders in 2-socket and 4-socket server virtualization performance.

  #1 server for Java: SPECJBB2005 - #1 performance with the R200, 2950 III, and R900; Top Java Based Application performance for 1-socket, 2-socket, and 4-socket servers.

  #1 server for power efficiency: SPECpower - #1 performance/watt for currently shipping systems with the 2950 III; The first industry-standard benchmark that measures power consumption in relation to performance for servers.

  #1 server for price per performance: TPC-E Price/Performance- #1 with the 2900 III; Top performance for on-line transaction processing workloads for database applications.

  The results speak for themselves - we've listened to our customers and what they're looking for in server solutions that are designed to simplify and deliver optimal TCO.

  This is exactly what Simplify IT is all about - delivering solutions that customers know will help them get IT faster, run IT better, and grow IT smarter. When you have the most highly optimized solution for your environment today, more IT budget dollars can go to innovation tomorrow - something every customer likes to hear. Learn more about simplifying your IT.

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• Treehugger's Collin Dunn to Guest Blog on Direct2Dell

  Fri. Nov. 09, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Next week, I'm pleased to welcome Collin Dunn from TreeHugger as our first guest blogger. This will all happen next week in San Francisco at Oracle OpenWorld 2007, where Michael Dell will be one of the keynotes on Wednesday. Collin will be there reporting for TreeHugger (and this won't be just about Dell). He'll post daily on what conference attendees are doing to draw attention to environmental protection and awareness. We hope this content will provide a broad look into what other companies and individuals are doing to address environmental concerns.

  For those in attendance, be sure to drop by the Dell booth at the Eco-Innovation Gallery located at Moscone North, in the Upper Lobby. There you can interact with members of our team and share your environmentally-responsible thoughts and ideas in an unprecedented way. We'll also upload lots of video to Direct2Dell, with a focus on what attendees from across the world are doing to improve our shared Earth.

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• No New Home Page This Year

  Thu. Nov. 08, 2007
  by Laura P. Thomas, Global eCommerce
  Well, the numbers are in from our most recent beta test of a new dell.com home page design, and they're not as I'd hoped. While one researcher recently found our web site to be "quite easy to navigate only after several visits," our beta metrics indicated that changing the home page actually made it harder for returning visitors to find what they were seeking.   

  So, we theorized that if we ran the beta test for a longer period, the return visitors would have time to become more comfortable with the new navigation. Thus, a longer beta run would show return visitor results beginning to level out with new visitor results in both the beta and control groups. However, after re-running the beta for twice as long, control continued to outperform the beta group. 

  We want to make sure that our customers know how to find what they are looking for on dell.com as we head into the holiday shopping season, and these results seem to indicate that the new page does not improve findability. Something  Peter Morville dubbed "one of the most thorny problems in web design." So, we will not launch a new home page until after the end of this year. 

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• Dell Community Forum Expands to Korea, Ratings & Reviews in More Languages

  Fri. Nov. 02, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  I have blogged pretty extensively about allowing customers to share ratings and reviews with other folks. Recently, we've added some more languages to the mix. Last week, we launched ratings and reviews functionality in Danish, Dutch, Swedish and Portuguese.

  And while I'm on the topic, I wanted to mention that we recently launched Dell Forums in Korea. Like our other forums, it's a place where users can go to ask questions and provide answers to support-related issues, and other topics of interest. Korean is the third language for Dell Forums, joining Portuguese and English.

  

  Two reasons why these things matter from a digital media perspective—ratings and reviews are a small step toward incorporating more community aspects into Dell.com, and having more conversations in more languages will be key for us moving forward.

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• My Thoughts on the Global High Tech Summit

  Mon. Oct. 29, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Last week, I attended Microsoft's Global High Tech Summit in San Jose to give folks an overview of Dell's experience since we tried to enter the conversation. I tried to talk about some of the progress we've made in the digital media space, the challenges we continue to face and what I think it means to companies in the future. 

  Participants were  made up of business leaders and executives. Lots of smart folks like Geoffrey Moore who spend a lot of their time talking to other companies about innovation.Then there was me. I might have surprised a few folks, because I was pretty straightforward about some successes we've had and some of the improvements that I know we still need to make. Frankly, I could have done a better job with the presentation, but here's some points I tried to make: 

  Any company can say they listen to customers. Many of those same companies are thinking about launching a blog, or forum, or the next IdeaStorm.  I think that in itself is a good thing. However, companies should be careful to ensure that these things don't just become checklist items. Launching these things is the easy part. Maintaining it and supporting the community is where the real work starts Integrating the customer feedback that results from these to make real business changes on behalf of customers is what will make you successful. Companies that don't figure out how to do that will probably fail, and they will fail publicly.

  Integrating that feedback is challenging, and that's an area where I know Dell needs to do better as a company. We need to get better at what I call connecting the dots. The reason why companies should be thinking about digital media is because these tools connect you to your customers. That's why the Dell Community Forum, Direct2Dell, IdeaStorm and our blog outreach initiatives beyond Dell have become early warning posts. In my mind, we should be taking the customer feedback that comes from digital media tools and comparing it to things we've been analyzing like the top call drivers and top issues in online tech support chat sessions. We have lots of work to do on this front and it will only become more challenging as we add more languages to the mix. Many folks here at Dell are thinking about how we take that next step.

  One of the highlights for me was listening to Pete Thompson, who is the GM of Microsoft's Surface Computing division.  If you haven't heard about it yet, it's like a coffee table with a clear display. Kinda like an iPhone plus the ability to interact with real objects like a cell phone, an MP3 player or digital camera. Amazingly cool technology, and one that I think will open up lots of possibilities in the future. If you want to see more, take a look at this article and video from Popular Mechanics to see what it's about.This video is similar to some of the functionality that Pete showed off.

  Man, was I bummed I didn't have my camera in that session. Cool stuff.

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• Social Media Club Bringing Shel Israel and Others to Dell

  Thu. Oct. 25, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  

  Since I'm on the road and haven't had time to pull this together, thought I'd leverage the work done my my good friend and colleague RichardatDell to tell you about the Social Media Club event we're hosting here in Round Rock on Tuesday, November 6. Now on to what Richard had to say:

  You thought all things social media were west-coast-oriented?  Not so. The Social Media Club shares best practices, establishes ethics and standards, and promotes literacy around the emerging area of Social Media.

  And, one of the places to start that conversation is right here. Starting the Conversation takes place on the Dell Campus on November 6^th with some of the "best and the brightest" coming for a one day workshop for anyone who wants to attend—from Dell and other companies.

  Co-founder of the Social Media Club Chris Heuer, Shel Israel, author of Naked Conversations, and local area notables Connie Reece and Kami Huyse will join members of the Dell team to discuss how social media can propel business to the next level.  We will discuss social media and how it can improve marketing, communications, recruiting, support and customer relationships.

  If you want to explore how business becomes personal again and learn about new and innovative ways to build stronger relationships, trust and loyalty, then plan on attending this workshop.

  There is special pricing for the Austin event: the regular price of $299 will be discounted to $199 if you register by Monday, October 29.  Use the discount code CONNIE for an additional $50 off when you register online.  If you're a member of Social Media Club at the professional, business or corporate level, the price is just $149.

  

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• Staples to Offer Dell Systems, Ink & Toner

  Mon. Oct. 22, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Today we announced a retail agreement with Staples, the world's largest office supply retail chain. Beginning on November 11, we will begin selling some Dell systems, displays, printers and ink and toner throughout 1,400 Staples stores across the United States.  

  Since we entered the printer market with Dell-branded printers in 2003, customers purchased replacement ink and toner via Dell.com. While that process has worked well for many of our customers, some like guardianxps shared an idea called "Sell ink cartridges at local retail" in the early days of IdeaStorm. We will still offer continue to offer ink and toner online—the only thing that this changes is that customers will have more options to get replacements when they need them.

  As far as systems and other hardware, we will offer unique configurations of our Inspiron 1521 and 1721 notebooks, our Inspiron 530 desktop, the 19-inch SE198WFP or the 22-inch E228WFP widescreen LCD displays. As far as printers, we will offer Dell's 926 and 948 all-in-one inkjets and the 1320c color laser printer. Staples will offer ink and toner for most models of our printers. Customers can recycle by returning used Dell cartridges to the store for a $3.00 coupon that is good toward a future ink purchase. 

  With this agreement, Dell products are now available in over 10,000 stores worldwide. It's all part of our evolving retail strategy. If you're interested in seeing all retail-related blog content, please take a look at the Retail category. Otherwise, you can also get an RSS feed to the retail-specific blog content here. 

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• Ratings & Reviews in More Languages

  Mon. Oct. 15, 2007
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Late last week, we rolled out ratings and reviews functionality in France, Germany and Spain for Consumer and Business systems.

   

  Since we began offering the ability to share ratings and reviews on October 4, we've now expanded the functionality to the following countries:

  • Canada
  • France
  • Germany
  • Ireland
  • Spain
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

  We plan to offer in more languages moving forward.

  Update 10/20—Direct2Dell reader MButler was correct to point out that I could have been more clear explaining how customers could get to ratings and reviews from the main home page. There are a couple of different ways you can get there, but essentially, you need to get to the product level to get to the ratings. If I can use Canada as an example, from the main home page, click Home & Home Office from the Notebook section.

  On the next page, if you scroll down a bit, you will see the Inspiron 1501 and the 1420. If you look just below the image of either, you will see a star rating graphic like this one:

   

  Clicking on that will bring you to the reviews page for the Inspiron 1420:

  

  Clicking on the red Product Details button will bring you to the Inspiron 1420 product page, where you can see thee review average, read all the reviews, or write one yourself.

  

  Otherwise, you can also get to ratings and reviews by going directly to the product page itself.

  

  I've hyperlinked the above images, so you can click on them to get to the corresponding page. Hope this helps.

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