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One of the clients I’ve been doing a lot of work with over the past year is Starkey Laboratories, and last Monday we launched a new consumer site. Here is their official announcement:

We’re very excited to officially unveil the all new Starkey.com website for the U.S. It has been completely redesigned to make it easy for site visitors to learn about the effects of hearing loss and the benefits of hearing aids.

The Starkey.com site was created with current as well as prospective hearing aid users in mind. In addition to clear, intuitive navigation, the site features a rich media video experience where a number of people share personal stories about hearing loss. Many of the faces are celebrities you may recognize such as Marlee Matlin, Arnold Palmer, Norm Crosby, Leslie Nielsen and Peter Marshall. The site also provides a very fast and easy dealer locator to drive inquires to the hearing health professionals who are authorized to fit Starkey products.

I worked as part of a collaborative team of independent consultants and internal resources. I was involved in defining the ux strategy and lead the information architecture, design, and metrics for the site (as well as implementing a flash based video player with closed captioning). Earlier this year we also launched Starkeypro.com which is a site for hearing professionals which includes very detailed technical product data and account management.

So have a look and tell me what you think! (Feel free to ask me any hearing aid questions as well)

Last fall I worked closely with Sun Microsystem’s UX team to redesign their home page (www.sun.com). I helped with the research, conceptual thinking, IA work, interaction design and the measurement plan. The new homepage launched in Dec and we are now tracking the usage. Which is the thing I am most excited about! Every link on the homepage can now be tracked.

So by combining this new usage data with the usability studies (that sun does a lot of), we can learn and evolve the design in a whole new way. We will begin to see which ideas work and which ones struggle (or flat out fail). But that’s the point, we will build on our successes and learn from our failures. I think this is a new way of thinking that designers and clients alike need to embrace. We can’t expect perfection, but we can learn from our mistakes — but we need to be able to see them first.

I will be presenting a case study on the project with Jennifer Bohmbach (Sun Microsystems) at MiMA’s February salon. I will post my presentation after that talk.