where the engineers are
While we used many resources to understand our audience at Texas Instruments—industry consultants, survey/tracking applications like WebIQ, web analytics, testing—sometimes the best insights came from just sitting down and running a little competitive analysis. Here, a PageRank snapshot and tools such as Compete had revealed a surprising top rival. This is one page of my analysis on why Microchip was ahead of our other competitors:
A specialized audience
At Texas Instruments, it's all (well, nearly all) about the engineers. CEO Rich Templeton is an engineer, many executives, product owners, and marketing staff are engineers, and a minimum of 85% of the web audience is engineers and engineering students. So user experience design is somewhat different than that for most audiences.
For one thing, engineers are highly purpose-driven. They have a goal in mind and want to achieve it, so navigation and content strategy must take engineering requirements into account. They are also more likely to be actively put off by flash and anything they regard as unnecessary, and would much rather read one long page than load several pages because of some classical design desire to have content above the fold. So while the above pages seem highly similar at first glance, read from an engineering perspective they are very different.
what, where, & when
Web Content Manager
Texas Instruments (TI.com)
Dallas, Texas
2006-2008
keywords
UX, content strategy, IA (information architecture), usability, SEO (search engine optimization), user-centered design, branding, copy writing, global virtual teams, project management, taxonomy, usability, B2B, B2C, HBX (with ReportBuilder), Google Analytics, parametric search, web analytics, Microsoft Office (especially PowerPoint, Excel), Visio, WebIQ, Adobe Dreamweaver, PhotoShop, competitive research.
