Wed. Jul. 02, 2008
To add to Fara’s post about the Dell.com redesign, I wanted to take the opportunity to explain how we design for 
the online user experience here at Dell and provide further insight into ways that Dell is continuing to foster a design-centric environment to benefit our customers.
Note: Click on any of the images in this post to see larger versions of all of them.
My team, an internal group of user experience designers, began our redesign efforts back in March with a lot of planning and strategy exploration. During this time we worked closely with internal business partners to define the objectives, requirements, and establish what success looked like to everyone. To build our strategy, we used current-state customer feedback and metrics as well as research and results from our previous design tests. This discovery process illustrated that there were a myriad of design options that we needed to consider.
Exploring these approaches took a lot of people, time and creative reviews. The initial round of designs included 24 different concepts and over 14 ways to navigate the page. After aligning on the goals for the page, our mission was clear: Beautiful imagery, more targeted navigation, space for fresh content, and more deep links into the site.
As we narrowed down the options, we tested the direction with users from our three main customer audiences (Consumer, Small & Medium Business, and Large Business) to ensure that we effectively captured each group’s needs. The feedback from this research informed some important design changes and reaffirmed the final design direction.
We know that a positive user experience has a direct correlation to a strong brand experience by allowing users to accomplish their goals easily. The end result of our efforts, which now live in the US with a 50% filter, accomplishes this with a clean and simple way to address the needs of our users by getting you where you want to go quicker.
Like Fara mentioned, we need your help to evolve the online experience at Dell.com. If you have thoughts to share about how to improve, respond to this post, go to the Dell Web Site area of IdeaStorm or weigh in at the Community Pulse page for Dell.com