“The layout is very organized and boring, very governmental like.” This was the first response I received when I was asking interviewers to critique bloomingtononline.net. This fell in line with my predispositions about this site–that it was very bland and had too much information. In this google-age, people don’t like to see clutter. Every person I interviewed talked about the cluttering of the website. One of my interviewees actually took the time to count the number of hyperlinks on the homepage, but stopped “after 50 or so.”
It is obvious that my website did not do very much research for its website, resulting in a distinct gap between what the users want and expect and what the website entails. Not only did every person I interviewed talk about the information overload, but they also said noted the poor placement of mission statement–the very bottom of the website.
If bloomingtononline.net would have done more research on what the users wanted and expected from the website, this website would be much more well received. While this may seem particularly obvious to students of HCI, its surprising that the web developers did such a poor job of communication with its constituents. After all, the website suggests that its purpose is to provide “an interactive information exchange for anyone who lives, visits, studies, or thinks about Bloomington, Indiana.” However, there has been very little interaction on the parts of the web developers to the users.
April 20, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I agree that there appears to be little interaction between the web developers and the users. After viewing the Web site for a few minutes, I do not get a sense that the Web site would be considered “successful”. Many of the postings seem to be random and a lot of it looks like it is being exploited for political advertisements. As a person that enjoys living in Bloomington over the past few years, I think the Web site does injustice to the city.
April 20, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I agree with your original interviewee. I think the site looks very nice and has some unique features but has way too much information. When I went to the main page, I noticed that I could scroll down but the only thing that was causing me to do this was the “Discuss Bloomington” section. I also noticed that the top had way to many options. I also thought the the general layout was really elementary for web design. It looks like the might have hard coded it themselves and thusly there are just tables inside of tables. I feel that by getting rid of a couple of features as well as making the website appear a bit more professional, it would do the site a lot of good.
April 21, 2008 at 12:51 am
I can understand why people would say that this website does look cluttered. However, I think it may suffer from the same issue that my team’s website is suffering from: a split audience. After looking at our interviews with people who looked at our site, we saw that there are people who have never been to the site before, and to them it was easy to understand. However, someone who is a frequent visitor may have a specific need that they have started to expect the website to give them. This is an issue that I think could be common with these “bland, informative governmental websites.”