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So, James recently administered some mild smackdown to Sun (and not so mild to HP) wrt. the design savvy (both visual and informational) of their respective web presences, and then challenged us on Twitter to comment on it. But I didn't. Other people did, but I just found his conclusion so blindingly obvious that I couldn't get worked up enough to say anything about it. What to say? +1

This morning, I read Jonny Bentwood's piece - The demise of the cult and rise of niche normality - which led me to the source of his musings, this piece by Ruby. I like the same basic quote that Jonny did:

they asked me about ‘the underground scene’, and what did I know about it. I replied that everyone increasingly knew about it, because it’s increasingly difficult to be different, hidden or secret when we share so much information so often. ...‘no true underground exists anymore’ and that was three years ago. Imagine what that means today when we are throwing our knowledge and insights ‘out there’ within 140 characters every 8 minutes, crafting posts, catching images, telling each other what we saw, when, how and where…

So imagine how gobsmacked I was when my wife thrust her laptop under my nose a few minutes ago, and forced me to watch H&M's "Cityguide" to Rome.

Here's a picture:

Wow. Let's list all the things that H&M does right here:

• It's purty.
• The site is obviously well architected -- that's gorgeous, full screen video, coming down smooth and easy on my 2M DSL line
• The video UI is very clever. I love the bookmarks on the timeline at the bottom
• The informational design (and here we close the circuit to James post about Sun, IBM and HP) is brilliant

That last point deserves some more exposition, but before we go any further, what H&M did wrong needs to be mentioned. I can't give you a link to what I'm talking about (look under "Inspiration" -> "City Guides" -> "Rome: The Guide"), cause H&M buried it in a Flash-only interface. No bookmarkability. Bad. Although -- the geek in me wonders if that might be a deliberate compromise, made to achieve their NFEs ("Non Functional Requirements" -- performance, scalability, etc.). Still. I bet Stefan could figure out how to do the same thing RESTfully.

OK. Back to the informational design thing -- here's what I mean. If you can, watch the video, and think about what H&M sells -- fairly nice, commodity clothing at a fairly low price. Now, as you're watching the video -- in which neither H&M nor its products are to be seen -- think about what H&M is selling here. The video wanders into hip little boutiques in Rome (ostensibly H&M competitors, but really in a different markup category), goes for a chocolate massage at the Hilton, for drinks in hip clubs, and window shopping at Prada. I dunno about you, but here's the message I got: "H&M doesn't sell Prada, but what it sells is hip, young, trendy, just as home in that hip club as Prada: just as good." It made me itch to get off the sofa and go buy clothes at H&M -- a minor miracle.

H&M gets it. And how.