Online musings of a T183 student

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Sat, 08 Oct 2005 11:06:22 +0200

In Lesson 2 a task requires: Take a look at http://www.ft.com and see what you think. Does this page display in your browser with its normal settings? What do you think about the length of the page? Is it too long for you? The page has some animations. Do you think they make it more attractive or more readable?

In our browser at home (AOL) the page in fact displays with quite a lot of white space on the right hand side. The full width is visible and the white space doesn't particularly add or subtract from the experience.

However the page is way too busy, hundreds and hundreds of words of dynamic content which although it was grouped together was still quite overwhelming.

It's not so much the length of the page that is the problem, but the amount that is crammed into that space.

The animated parts of the page range from mildly to very irritating. In particular, in a prominent position on the page, there is a car advertisement. If you hover over this the advert expands into an even larger advert. You then have to click away - on a neutral part of the page - to remove the advert and see the text underneath.

I didn't feel inspired to follow up any links or to explore the site any further: it tries too hard.

In defence of the site, I guess that FT readers are probably used to scanning loads of columns of tiny figures (tables of stocks and shares etc) so maybe the site is sticking with that m.o.

Comments

Type and fontfaces and all that

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 17:13:01 +0200

In Lesson 2 there is a session on typefaces which lives at this address

The Lesson asks us to critique the page itself, so here goes, albeit not very thorough.

This isn't the world's liveliest looking web page but there's a lot to be said for a plain design. However I could have done without the background image. It didn't make the text harder to read, necessarily, but it was distracting. I also found the default text size a little small.

If readability is to be improved I would suggest wider margins either side, maybe putting all of the text into a centre-aligned table set at 90% width. That way there would be 5% white space either margin and it would make the lines shorter. Bumping up the text size by one magnitude might not hurt either. Similarly, more generous line spacing might render the text a little less "monolithic".

I was very surprised to see the two links to external websites were presented in a text only format, i.e. not as hyperlinks.

These were they:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/

This uses a san serif font with some headings at roughly double the size and others in a smaller font using block capitals. The styling used for links means that they are not delineated except by colour though they appear underlined when you hover over them. The main menu is in block capitals. On the whole the site has a relaxed and uncluttered look and though the text is small it is readable because it's well spaced out. I don't much like the shouty capital letters though.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx

This has a businesslike look to it with the body text mainly in a serif font. However the side menu is sans serif as are some headings - I don't think the mixture works terribly well, it looks like two different web pages in frames (with no borders).
The subheadings are in italics which look rather odd while links are a rather vivid red. But on the whole no better or worse than the other one.

Personally I would recommend against specifying fontfaces in a web page simply because you can't guarantee your user will have it on their system. Relative sizes are fairly predictable and so are colours... so long as you stick to the web-safe palette.

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Looking back on first week

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 16:00:22 +0200

I got cracking on this course a few days early as I knew I would be away fro part of next week (the official start) and was keen to make sure I didn't end up falling behind. There's nothing worse is there.

This web page is a review of the first week (it's exercise 3 within session 5).

In summary: a pretty good week!

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Evaluation of the OU website

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 17:20:44 +0200

Evaluation of the Open University website:

Overall evaluation: A good website. Functionality: A+ Aesthetics:B+

Good Features:

Looks clean, calm, and uncluttered.
No heavy reliance on graphical elements or Flash rubbish
Easy to find what you want using links or search
Good prominent links to Privacy Policy, Accessibility information, etc
Didn't test the sign in though have done so in the past and it works fine (most of the time!)
The main image changes once in a while which makes the page look fresh and not neglected. Ditto the news stories.
Didn't seem to be any "Mystery Meat"
Good accessibility but...

Bad Features:

...accessibility is let down when text is viewed at largest size (using the buttons on the page which are a nice touch) - the "sign in" box obscures the bottom navigational elements
The OU logo with the bottom-to-top sideways text looks really bizarre. On some subpages the text is shown horizontally instead. I'd argue that the logo on its own is perfectly adequate and would get away from using "text as image"
Seems to load a bit slowly at times, even when refreshing the page

Evaluative comments:
This website is careful not to bombard you with too much information although it soon becomes apparent that there is masses of very useful content once you delve a bit deeper. Some of the sections look quite different to each other and to the Home Page which is a bit disorientating. It could be argued they each have their own identity maybe?

Comments

Real Life Coach

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 18:03:10 +0200

The Real Life Coach website is quite wonderfully bad.

The marvellous variety of fonts, font sizes, styles and colours takes real chutzpah (and yet not a single one is interesting to look at!)
There's so much stuff, absolutely no attempt to chunk things down into manageable sections
Remarkably, the page gets worse as you go lower down. I didn't see the kitchen sink, but it may well have been there somewhere
The Micro$oft Word clip art is not really very classy...
There seemed to be a form - which I didn't dare fill in - to subscribe to an "e-zine". This appeared twice, one beneath the other.
Underlined stuff that wasn't a link after all - - - argh!!!
There was a silly animated thing of a letter coming through a letterbox, presumably an "email me" link (I was too scared to click it and see). This appeared three times in the left hand column. Why? In case you changed your mind in the second or two it took to scroll between them?
The content was pretty off-putting... What do you suppose this bit means:

Most people -- just like you -- don't decide not to take action on their goals.

They just don't decide TO take action.

Can I think of any good features? Er, no!

That's probably quite enough for now. Overall evaluation: rubbish!

Comments

More site evaluations

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:46:52 +0200

I had a quick rummage around the Bletchley Park website and wasn't sure what "Mystery Meat" was being referred to. It was a bit fancy-pants on the menus but the accessible version was prominently signposted and worked fine. Good website and it looks like an interesting place.

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Websites that suck

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 22:00:51 +0200

I enjoyed looking at Webpages That Suck, in particular the various deliberately bad versions of the site. Special praise for the Sliding Doors version!

The Catfish website was just about usable but looked very slapped together and different sections were in various different hard-coded fonts. At least one in a horrible "calligraphic" script that I couldn't be bothered to read. But I got the impression that it is not as vivid as maybe it used to be!

Now this one sucked really a lot! Took ages to load and then the first thing you see is this bizarre landscape thing that rolls backwards and forwards. I couldn't really bear to explore too much but the subpages have a really awful navigation bar, about 1 pixel wide, that I especially hated.

Eyeball Design was staggering, specifically the weird rotating "menu" thing that meant you had to follow the buttons with the mouse to stand a chance of clicking them. An exemplar of the Mystery Meat phenomenon! I clicked on one called tips and tutorials (or something like that) and see that it was advertising events that took place three years ago. Which kind of says it all. But someone somewhere is presumably still paying the domain and hosting charges!

I didn't spend too long looking at the Nesta site but I especially hated the way some of their links are normal and obvious but others appear just like the rest of the text unless you hover over them. There were at least a couple of examples of "text as image", bummer if you use a web reader as the most prominent "About Us" one had no alt tag whatsoever so you'd be none the wiser as to who they are.

Anyhow this is enough for one evening. I'll look at some more sucky web pages another time!

Comments

BBC Webwise - critique

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 21:19:17 +0200

I've looked at the BBC webwise site before and consider it an excellent resource. The link is to one particular section which I spent a few minutes looking at. Wearing my critical hat here were a few things I thought were good and less good features:

Good features:

Doesn't overload you with information, written simply and intuitive to navigate. Looks quite good (but see below). Everything seemed to load pretty quickly (but see below). Text version adds to accessibility (but see below!) Lots of interactivity: quizzes and web quests (for example the "mission" to see if a particular virus is real or not). The Jargonbuster glossary is really good.

Not so good features:

I looked at one of the modules on viruses. while I quite liked the colourful and clear interface I very soon became irritated by the spider motif, especially when it drops down on its piece of web. So I clicked on the Text Only link and it was one long piece of text. I thought this was a bit shoddy, it wouldn't have hurt to have divided it up into a few smaller sections. An intermediate "kill the spider" link might be nice!

I then tried out a section which indicated it was for beginners: how to use your keyboard, mouse, etc. There was a "More Info" link which I didn't see until later on, this told me that it was a Flash resource. I think it would have been much better to have had a prominent link saying this before the resource actually loaded. Not everyone has Flash plug in and it is not very accessible (at all if using a web reader). It took quite a while to load and when it did the images looked a bit out of focus to me. Similarly some of the buttons on the main website used quite small text. I feel they should have had text only links there too.

Comments:

It's a great website in many ways but I'd have to criticise the sheer volume of stuff. It's great that the site is so comprehensive but also rather intimidating. The animated/Flash stuff is irritating but the text only version is not chunked very well so is a real turn off. It'd be nice to have an intermediate version that still looks okay but which dispenses with the spider and the animations.

Overall evaluation:

Very useful public service website

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Maiden Entry

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:46:21 +0200

A year or so ago as part of an Open University course we kept Movable Type blogs for a while. I found it quite a good way of keeping notes and links all in one place. So I thought I'd try something similar for this course - T183. This entry has nothing more to say!

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