Friday, August 31, 2007

Click Here? Click There? Hmm…

Navigating through a company’s web site shouldn’t be an exploration of discovery into unknown lands.

It should be an intuitive experience because your visitor will have preconceived notions of how your site should operate. You may not like it, but if you deviate from these prevailing standards, you do so at your own peril.

Yet some web designers still feel there’s a need to be creative. I’m all for creativity, provided it doesn’t interfere with usability.

I ran across a web site for a company called ShareChive. The company’s products and services may be excellent, but the site presents some serious stumbling blocks to any visitor.

When you visit the ShareChive site, you’ll be greeted by a doorway page that features an introductory animation. Usually, such a page will have a “skip intro” link so you can bypass the animation and head right for the main page. Some companies don’t offer a “skip intro” option, but will automatically send you to the main page when the animation concludes.

This is what the ShareChive doorway page looks like once the animation is over:

There is no “skip intro” link. There’s no automatic redirection to the main page. There’s no clear link to anything at all. So what are you supposed to do? Well, it turns out that you can click on the bar near the bottom to move into the main site, but it’s certainly not an obvious next step.

And at about 15 seconds, the animation itself is way too long. The main concept of the presentation is to combine the ideas of “sharing” and “archiving” to form the name of the company, “ShareChive.” Okay, I get it. Four or five seconds would be fine, but 15 seconds is an agonizingly long wait.

Once you’ve discovered the secret key for getting inside the main site, you’re once again greeted by a sensory overload of sound and moving imagery.

There’s at least a half a dozen things moving around on this page, and you’ll see that animation every time you click a link to another page, an experience that grows tiresome. And I don’t even understand the point of it all. For example, the tablet computer at the upper right closes, pans out of the frame, drops back down into the frame, and opens again. Why?

But it’s the rollover effects in the navigation area that go way over the top. Move your mouse into the navigation area and you get a cacophony of weird effects that looks something like this:

The rollover effects are quick enough, but they combine to create a very confusing look and feel.

And it seems as if the entire site is built into one Flash interface. That’s a big no-no and here’s why:

Click one of the links, for example the “News” page. Then click another one, for example, the “Contact Us” page.

Want to go back to the “News” page? No problem, just click your browser’s “Back” button. Where are you now? Well if you originally clicked to ShareChive from my link to the site above, well, you’re right back here.

Now click your “Forward” button. Where did it take you? Not the “News” page as you’d expect, but back to that mysterious doorway page where it all begins again.

This is inconvenient, confusing, and prevents search engines from indexing the content.

Does ShareChive care about any of this? I have no idea. But I don’t think they intended for their site to be an interactive video game. When I visit a company’s web site, I want to know more about the company, not go on a journey to mysterious new lands.

Posted by Richard Bloch

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