Nov 2-7

Nov 16-21

Addressing Polar Opposite Audiences

Interview with Richard Tammar

Richard Tammar knew exactly why he was attending an NNG conference. As the Internet and intranet manager for Lattice Semiconductor Corp., a maker of programmable logic chips in Hillsboro, Oregon, he was concerned that the Lattice site didn’t serve the needs of general readers, and was looking forward to the seminar on how to present corporate information.

“We have not updated the About us information on the site for a long time, since for a long time we have not had much investor interest in the company, since we have only been breaking even since the end of the dot-com boom,” Tammar explained. “But we believe that we are turning things around and that there will be increased investor interest.

“But right now, if you wanted to learn general things about us, you would be better off looking us up in wikipedia.org,” said Tammar, a former grammar school teacher from Brighton, England, who managed a British university’s website for five years before moving to the U.S.

Tammar said that a contributing factor to his company’s website problems is that it’s been using its Web homepage to market products to paying customers, and didn’t want to water down that message with general company information.

“When you get to the homepage, you find a big ad, which presents fairly sexy information—if you’re an electrical engineer and you get excited about things like FPGA and products with names like ‘MachXO.’ Likewise, what we do as a company is obvious to you if you are an electrical engineer. If you’re not an electrical engineer, the page is completely opaque. If you are an investor interested in the firm and trying to ask what the firm does, you’ll have to drill through to the corporate section with text describing the company.

“I want to make the site clear to members of the general public,” he explained. “I hope to find out what general readers are looking for, and return home with the requirements in hand. Then, we’ll identify who the people are with the necessary knowledge about the company and train them on what they need to do to keep the About us part of the site updated and fresh. We have a content management system, so there is a fairly straightforward interface for inputting text.

“It’s a challenge, meeting the needs of audiences as diverse as electrical engineers and investors, and what I hope to learn here are the best practices for presenting such information, especially as we don’t have a budget to do usability testing to get the same results ourselves.”

While the Lattice site includes some e-commerce features, Tammar explained that they’re not like those found on most e-commerce sites, due to the nature of the business. “It is the design engineers who decide what devices go on a circuit board,” he explained. “When testing a device, the engineer may need one or two samples, which he can get from the site. When the design has been finalized and it is time to go into manufacturing, thousands of units of the device may be required, with the usual questions of availability and shipping. Volume sales like that go through a dedicated sale force.”

Beyond the issues on the homepage, “There are several areas that we are focusing on, including the quality of our e-mail newsletters,” Tammar said. “And we have some online applications, such as registration, online forums, and various interactive elements on the sites, whose usability we are interested in improving.

“We want to add a part finder so that an engineer who knows the characteristics of the part he needs can perform a parametric search to find it, and if we are going to do that, we want to do make sure that it will be done in a way that is easy to use. That is why I’m taking the usability workshop.

“We know—everybody knows—that even the best sites can be improved and that they are a constantly evolving work in progress. But, while we always know that there is room for improvement, we don’t have enormous budgets for usability testing. So, we want to latch onto the best practices in the field, since that lets us piggyback on the research of others and apply it to our own website,” he explained.