Premier ServiceDesk provides both proactive support planning and problem resolution for Microsoft products for some of our largest, most demanding, and most influential customers. Specifically, the site is the online manifestation of Premier Support, which delivers rapid response times (including immediate, server-down response, which is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), special consulting and planning services, and access to Microsoft technical support information. Because this is a private site it is important that our audience feel we are addressing their needs, and that we are giving them special consideration.

Usability testing determined that while most people preferred a product-based site organization, some clearly required content to be grouped by content type first, then by product (all service packs, for example, sorted secondarily by product). Further, often the same people desired both organization schemes for different tasks.

My solution was to offer multiple paths to each piece of content, so that it can be accessed by product first, or by content type first. Later stage usability testing proved that to be a very successful and nearly transparent design.

• Multiple paths to the right content
• Parallel ActiveX and flat HTML sites with minimal production overhead
• Cascading control for efficient browsing
• Applications integrated to move more business practices to the web

Compounding the challenge was the fact that the audience was split between Netscape and Internet Explorer. Thus, any solution would need to either resort to the lowest common denominator, a flat html site, or create extra production work to maintain parallel sites, Considering the audience to be extremely influential and among Microsoft's largest customers, demonstrating IE-based technology as we brought more of our business processes to the web was a strong site design criteria.

To accommodate the differences in technological capability between Netscape and IE browsers at the time, we created parallel sites, one using ActiveX controls and the other a flat html site. To minimize ongoing production overhead, I drove the design of end node content templates that allowed the same end node content to be used in both sites, thus restricting the duplication of effort to navigation pages.

The cascade control used for the table of contents enables users to quickly locate desired content or applications without loading unnecessary middle navigation pages. Because users reported coming to the site in different mindsets, we used floating frames on the ActiveX home page to display four sets of headlines without extensive scrolling.