Take a moment to review the world’s worst website. What makes it as terrible as it professes itself to be? What improvements might you suggest and why? http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/
Years ago I presented this website to my grade 3 / 4 students as a critical thinking exercise. My goal was to provoke thought into what makes for effective web design and provide samples of both “good” and “bad” websites. I dug up a number of sites with consideration to aesthetics, intuitiveness, and usability. From my years of web searching, I thought I had a reasonabl grasp of what made for effective design, however, having read through the Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines document, I wish to reopen this. Consider the link below:
The usability article outlines a number of key design considerations, including layout and intuitiveness. In terms of layout, the Wisconsin Visual Culture program website is simple, providing relevant visual content with minimalist sensibility. There is nothing graphically intensive that would impact load times. At first glance, the eye chart on the left is identifiable in its formatting, however, a closer examination reveals it represents characters from a variety of languages. I infer this to mean the program is designed to meet a diverse range of learners. The diagram of the eye to the right is also relevant to the content.
While the site succeeds in its aesthetics and load times, it is lacking in its intuitiveness. The usability article stresses, “users will make the best use of Web sites when information is displayed in a directly usable format and content organization is highly intuitive.” (pg 9) The coloured vertical squares provide no accompanying text, yet we are expected to intuit these will provide us with pertinent information. I accept that this site is promoting visual navigation, however, if there is no text, there should be visual icons associated with each category. How am I to reasonably intuit that a light blue square means ‘events’ while darker blue means ‘curriculum’ and ‘faculty members?’ In addition, holding the mouse over one of these squares extends a line to the eye diagram. ‘Departments and units’ is at the back of the eye. Does this mean it is of lesser importance than ‘Trans Conference,’ which is at the front?
I think a visual presentation for this website is an interesting idea, but it should not be at the expense of intuitiveness and usability. This could be easily remedied through the use of quality visual cues and connecting these cues to fit with the diagram of the eye. One way might be to imbed the categories in with the terminology of the eye. For example, ‘Through the lens of curriculum’ could associate curriculum with a particular anatomy of the eye, and so on. Otherwise, I think the eye must be separate and not interfere with the accompanying visual cues.
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