I thought of critiquing a website that is not know to many, but i dont see that as much fun. Unfortunately sometimes budget constraints and cheap designers create a bad website and what can you do. So what about the companies that have loads of money? can they create a well made website? can it be made so that most users can enjoy their experience on their site? or is it too hard to do even with all the money in the world? is there a perfect website that 80% of the people enjoy?
I dont know, lets look at the big guns first
First giant to look at is:
www.espn.com
A major website, that has probably thousands of visits per hour. For sports there is no other website that can compare. Shows movie clips of each sport and gives you many options to choose from.
But it is too cluttered? the changing news tab on the bottom and the highlight clips on the right, and the updated news on the top right, and on the bottom right is the online poll, and etc....
Is it consistent?
The top tabs change from link to link. If you click on boxing or NCAA basketball the top tabs change to a different style. We lose the side movie clips on certain pages, we lose the online poll on certain pages.
How about information on the not so famous sports, could you find Arena stats, film and highlights? How the new dart champion, or pool champion, swimming, or so on...
Is the search effective?
do the pop-ups annoy too much?
What about the fact the video player on the site automatically starts without you wishing it to.
Can this website be improved? it needs to provide online up to date stats and have the ability to show you all the sports in the main menu. Are all these nuisances a necessary evil?
Well in my opinion yes. As an avid sports fan, i wish to know everything thats going on. So the more readable sports that is displayed on the screen, the more i enjoy. What about a new user? would he or she feel comfortable with the loading times, since most of the website is not cached on their computer. Would they be interested enough in searching through the whole website to find a certain player?
i dont think so, to many distractions and pop-ups in the way. Then there is the constant reminder to buy the ESPN insider package. A new user would have a headache with all of this pumpin out at the screen.
what do you guys think?
Would a non-sports fan, who is interested in becoming one, would fall in love with this website?
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2 comments:
Good grief. I love ESPN.com because of the unbelievable amount of great content, but the design is almost unbearably overdone. You identified many of the annoyances, like the auto-start video player that jolts me with an unexpected sports anchor voice starting his spiel.
Then there's the crazy "ESPN in Motion", also a default. The rollover navigation is hyper-sensitive, the page loads can be very slow, and once in a while they throw in a big ad that takes over most of the home page for about 10 seconds. Overall, the home page is just way too busy.
What I generally find, though, is that once you get past the home page, it gets better. Most of the sport category pages are well-organized, and it's pretty easy to do research. If I want to see a team's stats, or if I want to see who the linebackers in this year's draft are, it doesn't take long. And I like the use of JavaScript for browsing various writer's latest postings.
I know the site well and so I can put up with the problems. Hard to say whether a sports newbie would find the site usable. Probably not.
Forgot to include my name... Krusteaz = Chris Keating.
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