Bad Usability
So I have not posted in a few days and I’m not happy about that. I really want to start posting more frequently but have troubles keeping up while in school. Anyways I came across something that I found to be a great example of bad usability so I decided I could do a quick post about it. Usability is a big issue on the web today and any web designer worth anything is trying to achieve the best usability they can. It is a topic that I am trying to be better educated on because it’s what will help set me apart in the future from the competition and give me something to sell myself with when faced with a do-it-yourselfers.
I’m a HUGE hockey fan, so when my team (The Ottawa Senators) moved into first in their division I wanted to see how many games the next team behind had before the Olympic break. When I went over to the Buffalo Sabers’ web site I was greeted by this splash page.
Screen shot of Buffalo Sabers' landing page
Now first off splash pages on their own can be bad usability depending on who you ask. In my opinion you should only use a splash page if it’s serving a very specific and useful purpose, such as a language selection, or location selection before serving up the page. All NHL clubs use their splash pages as advertisements that are always changing, which can confuse some users especially since this means the link to enter is always in a different spot and styled differently. Maybe at some point I’ll spend a while collecting screen shots of the ever changing splash pages to demonstrate this, it would be an interesting project anyways.
For this example in specific it’s not even about the debate for or against splash pages it’s, can you even find how to enter the site at first glance? That’s right its that small un-styled link at the bottom of the page under all that advertising! Oh and I would also like to point out that at some monitor resolutions the fold is right at the bottom of the bottom advertisement meaning this link falls just out of the viewable area of the page with no indication that anything lies bellow. If you were not an experienced user you would not spend the time to try and find your way in, and they would probably just click on the first clickable area which would lead to the page to buy tickets. If this is not why the user was going to the page then they would be frustrated by this, and as anyone in the industry knows a frustrated user is not a happy user, and a non-happy user means a non-returning user, and a non…. ok I think you get the point.
I’ll wrap this up so it’s not too long of a read but I do hope to do some more posts on usability as I advance and learn more since it is something I think is very important. The better I am at designing and creating more usable sites, the higher the conversation rates, and the more valuable I would become.
Just my opinion.
Have you read any of Jacob Neilsen’s work on usability?
@Michael Martineau I have, he’s very conservative when it comes to some of his stuff but ya I have had to read up on him in school. Funny thing is I don’t find his site overly usable some times. But all in all he makes some very good points and has had a great amount of impact on usability on the web.