SunWeb: User Interface Design for Sun Microsystem's Internal Web

Abstract This paper presents the methods used to design the user interface and overall structure of the internal Web pages for Sun Microsystems. Sun has an extensive set of information available on the WWW with our home page as the access point, but we also wanted to provide employees access to internal information that could not be made available to the Internet at large. Much of the user interface work was done in a few weeks with four usability studies completed in a single week: card sorting to discover the users' view of the information space, an icon intuitiveness study, and two tests of the actual interface. The conclusions from this project are that a uniform user interface structure can make a Web significantly easier to use and that “discount usability engineering” can be employed to base the design on user studies even when project schedules are very tight.