Skip to main content

Website Usability Critique


 

The website that I critiqued for this post is the Art School at Yale. This website violates many of the web design principles that we have studied in this chapter. 




  • Precedence (Guiding the Eye)- As I researched how humans read and consume websites one thing that the Yale website fails to do is guiding the viewer. The purpose of the website is to inform the viewer about the school and the events that are taking place. The website fails to provide an easy way for the viewer to know what is important and guide them to it. 
  • Spacing- Recently design trends have favored the use of white space for a modern look. This website however goes overboard with the amount of whitespace that they have on the site. This website is not visually pleasing as the whitespace makes it feel empty and it is hard to determine what is important on the site as a whole. 

  • Navigation- The navigation on a website is designed to make websites easier to navigate. To put it simply, the navigation should help you establish where you are and where you want to go. Proper navigation should be very intuitive and help the user find the information they are looking for quick and easy. This website falls short on this account and provides several different navigation sections that are spread throughout the site. Users need to click through these various sections to find what they need to which leads to confusion for the user.
  • Typography- Text is the most common element in a website. Making sure that you choose the correct font (not something that distracts users) the correct size and proper spacing will ensure that users will be able to get the information they need from your website. This website has a myriad of different fonts that are used and I believe that really detracts from the content on the website. 
  • Usability- According to Hubspot, in 2021, there were 7.1 billion mobile users and those devices generated 54.4% of the global website traffic. For a website that has important dates as well as information about the school it is imperative that they optimize their website for mobile. When checking the website did not scale to a smaller window and much of the information was cut off from the viewer. Going a step further, I checked through the website and I noticed that many of the images were missing accessibility features like ALT tags to help disabled persons visiting the website.

Connecting to last week, when we talked about multiple intelligences, there are two specific groups that would most likely be turned off from this website. The website has  no reference to naturalist or musical / rhythmic themes. With this being said, the author of the site could understand their audience as being more aligned with other intelligences thus they designed their website with that in mind. 



Comments

  1. Jack WillardSeptember 11, 2022 at 8:39 PM

    After looking at the site, Yale School of Art, the first thing that disgusted was the layout and the spacing. I believe you hit the nail on the head when you said there was way too much white space. The use of too much white space actually makes me believe that the website was not formatted correctly. The spacing of the different areas with the different size text and shaded areas don't make the website appealing. I agree that I have no idea where I should be looking on this webpage because it feels like everything was just thrown on and the best organization is only the side bar tabs. As someone with the musical intelligence, I can tell you that you were correct in your thought that we would venture away from this site immediately. My logic and musical intelligence together really dislike the website design as well as makes me feel that this website was not made by anyone who had design in mind.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Application of Multimedia in the Classroom

Oxford defines multimedia as using more than one medium of expression or communication. These mediums can include text, photos, videos, and other immersive technologies. Upon researching multimedia there were several examples that I have been applying in my classroom. The reason that I utilize multimedia in my classroom is to keep students engaged in the content. Some of the content that we go over in cyber security can be very dry but utilizing videos of the application of the theories helps the students understand the “why”. By utilizing multimedia I have noticed that the students are much more successful when applying the content that we are learning. When reviewing the different principles of multimedia and how to apply them to design a project or a lesson, I found that multimedia can really help with managing the essential processing of the content that we are learning. The segmenting principle (breaking down the lesson into self-paced content), pre-training (presenting the key id
1 comment
Read more

Appealing to Spatial and/or Naturalist Intelligences

When explaining complex concepts, especially in networking, I have found that the more multimedia the better. I always aim to appeal to as many students learning styles as possible. Below is an example of a Thinglink that takes an otherwise flat theory, like the OSI model, and presents it with different images and videos to help students. Spatial intelligence is the concept of being able to perceive and derive insight from visual data. The goal of this multimedia project was to take the theory of the open systems interconnect model and share various videos about the different parts of the model to help students visualize what is going on at each of the 7 layers. The image by itself is an example of taking a theory and presenting it in a multimedia way but with tools like Thinglink, we can take that a step further!  In the figure below, you can see the path that information that we are presenting makes its way to the long-term memory. Utilizing the different levels of multimedia we are
1 comment
Read more

Utilizing Video In The Classroom

When it comes to cyber security, I have found that many of the concepts can be a little difficult to understand for high school students. Multiple passes of the content have really helped re-enforce and improve the learning experience in the classroom. I have found that utilizing video has really helped by appealing to as many intelligences and learning styles as possible. I have found that video appeals to my visual - spatial learners as well as my verbal-linguistic learners due to the nature of video instruction. Last year I started flipping my classroom in which my students could watch the videos of my lectures and then in class we could do more hands-on activities to appeal to my learners that learned better in this way. I noticed that students enjoyed being able to watch the lectures to learn the content and then re-watch content that they didn't understand. As I look to design my courses for next year, my goal is to incorporate even more video. Below is a video that I made fo
1 comment
Read more