The assignment:
For this 800-1000 word paper, I ask you to analyze a website from the perspective of usability. Find a website that you like, and that you think works fairly well for its purposes (for an example a commerce website, a social networking website, a political website) but that has flaws that frustrate you when you use it. We have all had the experience of wanting to like a website, but finding ourselves frustrated when we actually use it. Your job in this paper is to describe the usability flaws in a website and then describe how you would go about fixing them. In the course of the paper, you should address concerns and strategies raised by Steve Krug in Don’t Make Me Think. Use the website you choose as a case study in usability. Test out several scenarios that a typical user might encounter. What is wrong with the site? If you were in charge of it, how would you fix it?
Usability Analysis of http://www.home.no/sofurre/
I have chosen this particular site, simply because there is so much wrong with it, so it should be easier to analyze it. It certainly makes you think, too much, way too much. I must point out that I have no idea who is the maker of this site, and I’m not trying to be mean or anything like that…
For starters the layout is a catastrophe. I can’t seem to understand what this page is really all about. Is it some sort of blog, or a news site? Sure, I’d like to be able to understand what the site is actually trying to tell me, and it really doesn’t tell me anything when I look “above the fold”. Maybe that it has something to do with being creative in Bergen? (by clicking the thumbnail below, you can see the site’s «above the fold», and save some time, since the actual site takes ages to load, and is just… annoying).
The first time I visited the site, it came to my understanding that this is some sort of person who lives in Bergen, who is actually bloging, without actually using a blog template, such as WordPress or Movable Type. This makes the home page unbearably long, and it takes absolute ages to load. It doesn’t help that it’s packed with absolute links (the pictures in particular), and flash animations. You just keep on scrolling, forever.
What I think is the logo of the site, is located at the upper left corner of the site. Where it should be, in other words. But it’s too tiny to really stand out as the logo of the site, and it doesn’t really tell you what the site actually is. This could possibly be remedied by adding a tag line, but there is no such thing to be seen. Unless you count the site’s title “::En side I stadig utvikling::”, a page in constant development (let’s hope that it’s true).
The header and the navigation of the site is the same thing, or so it would seem. The navigation isn’t categorized at all, and just seems to be links that have randomly been put there, as some sort of filler, perhaps.
So, what would I do to make this site functional? First of all, I would make it into a blog, which would make it a lot easier to navigate. It would also make the “news” easier to find, by tagging them or categorizing them. And they would be dated as well, which is always a plus when it comes to news.
I would also make a header that has practically nothing to do with the navigation, or at least separate them more clearly. Tabs are a great option when it comes to this. The links should also be put into some sort of order, or categorized at the very least. Below you can see a mock-up of what this site could look like if it was, in fact, a blog.
Some of the other pages of the site, have music that starts playing when you visit them. This is absolutely the most annoying thing in the world, and should be banished or made illegal or something. Not only does it distract the visitor, it takes absolute ages to load, which you really don’t want in addition to the pictures and flash animations.
Basically, by adding tabs, categories and some sort of search option, it should make this site a much better one. By removing all of (or at least most of) the disturbing elements, such as animations (have been proven to distract the eye, and can also be terribly tiring to look at), this site should be able to serve its purpose: To inform the reader, be at least OK to look at and be easier to navigate. By adding an e-mail address where you can contact the author you would also give the reader/user of the site a possibility to contact the author without commenting one of the posts.
And also, the texts of the site seriously need to be reduced when it comes to unnecessary words. A spell-check wouldn’t hurt either. When people arrive at a site and see typos, they automatically start distrusting the author of said text, because a clever person wouldn’t publish something that’s flawed, hence couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. It’s a perfectionist’s world.