A quick look at the new Computer Science departmental website
Written on Monday, December 8th 2003 by , Lightreel.
At the request of Des Traynor, I've written a short review of the new website for the Computer Science department. This document is by no means thorough and by no means lengthy, but acts primarily as a list of major design issues with the new site annotated with short justifications.
A more detailed analysis can be provided on request.
The Homepage
When a user goes to the CS homepage, they are presented with a page consisting of very little other than links to sections of the site. These links are provided on top of a murky background image. The contrast between the links and the background image is also very little, making them less obvious. Most appear to be sitting on colours of near identical hue.
Current conventional wisdom dictates that the user should be provided with information on the homepage, to be instantly engaged so that their attention is not lost. The current "portal"-based design doesn't do that. The user has to pick a section of the site that interests them before any reasonable amount of information is provided.
Some information is provided implicitly that I'm sure wasn't intentional. Because of the distances between the three columns of links, they appear to be split into three groups of links.
The Banner
The banner at the top of the site is, quite frankly, horrendous. It has no text equivalent, the layout of elements within it is sloppy, and I don't know what the heck is the story with the drop shadow.
The information contained within the banner include:
- The name of the web site.
- The English and Irish versions of the phrase "National University of Ireland, Maynooth".
- Telephone number, fax number and email address of the department.
Because there is no text equivalent, only users of browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firebird, who have images switched on, will get this information. Users of screen-readers and Lynx will not, and neither will Google.
The worst problem with the banner, visually, is the drop shadow. I don't understand why the drop shadow is there. It contributes nothing to the look of the site. It's also quite a lot darker and blurrier than it should be. The one pixel border is blurred into a four or five pixel shadow.
Internal pages
Once you move from the homepage to the internal site, the site changes character substantially. Although a consistency is good, I think that getting away from the horror that is the homepage is better.
I know I keep going on about how bad the homepage looks, but it's absolutely terrible. I don't see how most of the design decisions can be justified. I know it wasn't designed by a designer, but I can't help but think "Why the heck did you do that?"
But now we have some more problems. Here's a screenshot of the research page. Can you find the links?
There are 46 links on this page, 33 of which are in the main body of the text. This makes up the majority of the text on the page. But even worse than this is that it is not obvious what text is links and what text is not.
Then we get duplication:
The links should be annotated in some way, to talk about what type of content is in that section. I have a degree in Computer Science & Software Engineering, and I don't know what the term "Transport Telematics" means.
Some links have a roll-over effect that changes the weight of the font to bold. This causes some of the links to take up more lines, which in turn causes a "popping" effect which is quite jarring.
Miscellaneous
- Banner moves around from page to page
- HTML is attrocious. The body and html tags are closed twice on the homepage.
- Inaccessible to users with disabilities. Web standards can help.
- Inaccessible to users of PDAs, mobile phones, or any non-traditional user agent (anything other than a visual web browser running on a modern PC, essentially). Again, Web standards can help.
- Linked sub-section headings, on the "Courses" page for example, are in a smaller font than the rest of the text.
