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Post by Sophie Reverdy on Feb 22, 2013 22:55:44 GMT -5
I worked at a methadone clinic for two years out of college. I had to consult the Department of Health and Human Service's Maryland Medicaid website frequently and had to refer patients to it often. I would like to volunteer this website to the Hall of Shame, for its general lack of navigability. mmcp.dhmh.maryland.gov/SitePages/Home.aspxThe contents of this website are loosely organized, and do not have the user experience in mind, which makes learnability an issue. For instance, the site gives you the option of searching a directory of providers, which is a basic task that people visit this page for a lot, but the link to the directory is at the very bottom right hand corner of the page. This website serves distinct groups looking for distinct types of information ( ie providers vs. Medicaid recipients themselves). Resources/contents are not organized based on user group, which makes finding information that much more problematic. As far as memorability goes, I can say personally that I often found it difficult to access forms and information a second time. These short comings do not serve a large portion of the potential user group of this website in mind. A number of our patients were low income, had cognitive or physical disabilities, and limited access/experience with computers. If I was having a hard time finding information, I'm quite sure it would be nearly impossible for this group. |
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Post by elizabethland on Feb 22, 2013 23:14:12 GMT -5
I have two notes: First, there are a lot of of graphics and photos and the like. I had a bit of user overload when I first visited. It was only after scrolling around that I understood what was going on and what this person was all about. Which leads me to my second point. When opened in Safari (I was opening it on a computer at work that only has Safari), the top navigation blanks out, likely due to some fault in the javascript or CSS that won't allow it to correctly load in Safari, a problem that can be remedied with a little more work on the webmaster's part. While I admit Safari is a little-used browser, for those that do only use it, the site begins lacking some of the basic tools needed to navigate it. Once I opened it in Firefox, I was able to see some of the missing parts, but the navigation buttons only revealed themselves when they were hovered over. This detracts from the overall usability of the page. Even though there are other ways to move around the site, the main navigation buttons are invisible (at least in Safari and Firefox on the Mac at my workplace), which means the site is less intuitive to navigate, even if it's only messing up for older Macs running dated browser software. Not enough to pull it out of the Hall of Fame, but these are both factors that can and should be addressed. |
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Post by emyers on Feb 22, 2013 23:14:39 GMT -5
www.fanfiction.netI agree with Lauren that this site is overall very intuitive and user-friendly. However, I could see a few possible problems for new users or people who aren't used to searching databases. One problem related to speed would be the amount of information overload you might experience on certain pages if you don't know how to search correctly - it doesn't seem that there's a very good way to simply "browse" the Harry Potter section, for example, since there are over half a million stories! Unless you know exactly the type of story you want, you're going to have to wade through quite a large amount of pages. I could also see a problem arising from genre mix-ups: what if what you're looking for is both a game and a television show, for example? How would you know where to look? Like I said, though, the site does offer quite a few options to avoid these errors, but new visitors might not necessarily know how to use them. Of course, there is no way to anticipate ALL possible problems that users might face when using a site as large as FanFiction.net. www.thepioneerwoman.comAt first I felt a little overwhelmed by the background and all of the pictures included on the home page, but then I discovered how easy this site really was to navigate. I like the color scheme change at the top for each different section, and the site as a whole is aesthetically pleasing. From a user preference standpoint, I could see this site appealing to people are tired of drab blog layouts. On the other hand, I could also understand people feeling overwhelmed or perhaps a bit confused by all of the content. Still, I think the majority of visitors are going to be impressed by the obvious amount of effort that the author has put into the appearance of her page, and this will most likely counteract any slight usability problems they may encounter.
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Post by Sophie Reverdy on Feb 22, 2013 23:20:59 GMT -5
Oh wow, the Yale Art Site is an incredible mess. While the site is pretty inaccessible to any user, I'm thinking specifically about issues that a user accessing the site with the aid of a screen reader or other adaptive technology might have. The homepage alone would be impossible to navigate, because so much of the text appears in these crazy flashing images. The flashing/flickering elements are definite seizure triggers for people with photosensitive epilepsy.
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Post by elizabethland on Feb 22, 2013 23:25:31 GMT -5
I agree that this site is difficult to navigate. For example, the A to Z index was not well-organized. I was looking for rabies vaccination information under "V" (for vaccine). It wasn't there, so I tried looking under "R" and found the link to that area was broken. That's not the only link broken. Important information on accessibility and privacy notices, which was hidden in tiny type at the bottom, were also broken links. A user wanting to know that their search for AIDS information would be private. I assume accessibility should have offered insight into online or office service for disabled people, but that link was also broken. And in the middle of this the page just went down. Perhaps these broken links are being fixed? Even if fixed, the fact that I can't access it right now decreases user preference, since I may never return again. EDIT: Looks like broken links have been remedied, but I still say that broken links are a quick way to keep a user from ever coming back. And the A to Z index is still oddly organized and the search function was difficult to use. |
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Post by Sophie Reverdy on Feb 22, 2013 23:44:03 GMT -5
I'm noticing that a lot of websites, Fame and Shame alike would actually do poorly by W3C's Accesibilty Initiative standards. Check out the W3C's accesibility guidlines here: www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ , and if you have a Mac and some extra time, try to navigate some of these Shame pages with the use of VoiceOver just to get a sense of how frustrating/impossible it is. I think the two that stand out though, on this end, are definitely the Yale site and the Jami Lin site. Both use really terrible color and provide no alternative text for images and complex graphics, which they are chock full of. |
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Post by vsmith15 on Mar 1, 2013 15:47:31 GMT -5
This is a great site, Victoria! I had never seen it before but I am enjoying browsing around. The navigation in particular is fantastic. I like that the tabs along the top that split the site into each category are really helpful. I also like that as you click each, the theme and overall presentation remains the same, but a different color is given for each to distinguish them. We have all talked a lot about when websites are too long and scrolling down to the bottom is a pain and doesn't look good - however, in this case, it works. Since it is a blog-type format, it makes sense that as you scroll down there are more and more entries. And you can use the search as an alternative, so it is not obtrusive to scroll down like that. Do you know if she really runs all this on her own (Ree, the author introduced along the right)? If so, she must be crazy busy and also probably the most impressive person I've ever seen. She started the blog and won several "Bloggies" awards on her own before she hit it big and then hired a design firm to help. |
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