The making of our new SITsite gave us the opportunity to apply the SIT method to a task of our own: to figure out what this site should be, how it should work, what it should do, and look, and sound like. Since you’re experiencing the site for yourself, we thought you might be interested in how it came to be.

The website’s concept was chosen from 43 ideas that arose during the workshop we conducted in April 2004 to start planning the new SIT site. Five professionals from Puzzlehead, a communication design firm, spent six hours with five SIT team members, using SIT tools to come up with innovative concepts. The site you’re in is the result of applying several of those concepts. Below you can see five other ideas that were not used (and which you may want to use yourself!).

The website’s home page will look like an SIT-branded Google page. Instead of a navigation bar, users will see only a search engine. When they type in key words, they will get relevant content (possibly including recommended relevant content from the web). An extra feature could be “I’m feeling…” buttons: “I’m feeling lucky,” “I’m feeling bored/curious/impatient/etc.” Hitting “I’m feeling confused,” for instance, opens a regular homepage with a standard navigation bar.

There will be two sites – one for the innovation lover and the second for that person’s boss. The first one will be cool and deep and innovative, and the second will be called: Show this to your boss (or call us if you don’t have one). It will be much much shorter, extremely matter of fact, and will include all the rational arguments for working with SIT.

The home page looks conventional, with navigation and all other features operating in the usual ways. But the site recognizes how much SIT experience and background surfers have and allows or restricts access to certain of the site’s features, based on those criteria. For example, a first-time visitor attempting to access some advanced content will receive a message: “Hey, not on the first date,” with the accompanying link: “Maybe you would like to read this first?” In contrast to real life, an “Insist?” button will seduce the site into allowing access to those who just can’t wait. 

Imagine a huge sheet of paper (say 4*4 meters) with the entire content of the site written on it in a structured way. Now imagine a black sheet, of identical size, covering the first. The black sheet has no text on it except for a site map that refers to the location of the various sections of the text in the sheet below. When you surf onto the site, all you see is the black sheet, with one “hole in the mask” or spotlight to allow you to read a bit of text in the bottom sheet. The spotlight is controlled by moving the mouse, allowing the readers to direct the “light,” to those parts of the text that they want to read.

The homepage is a set of links to pages on other sites so that you learn about us indirectly, and thus more objectively. For example: to read about our method we refer you to articles and references on other sites; for clients we refer you to their websites, where they talk about working with us. We will also create content specifically, offer it to other relevant sites, and then link to them.