Theater 11 or theater 12?

Here’s a great example. I was walking into a theater about a week ago and saw this brilliant signage.

At first glance I couldn’t believe I was reading that correctly. In the space of two or three minutes, there were several comments made by people walking into the theater. Ok, I’m not counting the people I was with, because they are big geeks like me and notice these things.

I glanced at a couple theaters on the way out and the numbers are supposed to be read down, which makes the signage much more useful. All they have to do is put a vertical line between the numbers to help the eye differentiate between them.  In the case of theater 11 and theater 12, the numbers read correctly top-down or left-right. Perhaps an edge case, but pretty important for at least several hundred patrons every day.

Despite my focus on software usability, we a bombarded with bad design everyday. Wouldn’t it be great if people spent just a little more time thinking things through the rest of us could get through the day with a little less frustration? Nobody is perfect, but how many people signed off on this? The architect, the contractor, the person applying the signs, the investor(s), the manager(s), the rest of the staff, etc. etc. etc. Remember, if one person complains about something, there are probably 50 others that noticed it and just didn’t say anything.

What bad designs have you been victim to today?

Omaha.com is one of the few sites that consistently degrades the experience with each “upgrade”

Let’s just ignore the poor content for a moment and focus on the design (text included, but not specific content).  I don’t know who the “designer” was (and I’m using that term loosely here), but I do know that he needs to look for a different line of work (or at least learn how to do his chosen line of work a bit).

For the sake of convention in this post, I’m going to call our designer friend Tim the Designer or Tim for short (if, by some strange coincidence, the designer’s name actually is Tim, I apologize; if the designer happens to be a woman, I apologize… to women everywhere for such a poor representation of work).

Header

This might be the worst header I’ve seen since 1997.  It is way to thick.  There are about 170px of wasted space (light blue with gratuitous ads) before we get to the real header.  I understand Tim the Designer (or more accurately, his boss the Paper) needs to have ads displayed to support the Paper… after all, with the Paper’s lack of quality control I wouldn’t expect people to actually pay for it.  However, it’s important to temper those ads with some reasonableness.  Cracked has better ad placement, and they aren’t exactly the typical aspiration of “legitimate” news sites.

Examining the header of Omaha.com

I’m not sure why the navigation is so small on an overly thick gray bevel.  I  don’t know why Tim the Designer chose a serif font for the navigation either.  At this size and weight serifs make letters look smudged and difficult to read.  Why do  designers like Tim insist on making important navigation all CAPS?  Don’t they realize people read by recognizing word shapes?  The high and low points within a word help define those shapes and make it easier to read.  This is typography 101 stuff, Tim (do you think Tim knows a big word like typography?).  Maybe I’ll send a copy of Helvetica to Tim.  It might help get him on the right track (different line of work?).

Where are the tabs?  It looks like Tim tried to create a tab metaphor, but then forgot to actually include the tabs.  This leaves us users oblivious to our current location within the site.  No big deal when we’re on the homepage like the above example, but it is pretty confusing once we dive into a section or article.

This is a site supposedly interested in content, yet I have to look for the search mechanism.  There was a great survey done just a few months ago about search location patterns.  Thanks Tim, you’ve completely destroyed that UI pattern we’ve all grown accustomed to.  Why?  Does Tim bother to ask questions like, “why?”

Secondary navigation

But why stop there?  Tim certainly didn’t.  We’ve also been given secondary navigation that drops out of the primary navigation on roll-over.  Tim, there’s a nifty concept in UXD (or HCI or whatever you want to call it) called discover-ability.  Those primary navigation links don’t even really look like links; they certainly don’t look like additional options are available.  On top of poor discover-ability, those navigation links have elusively small target areas (putting your cursor above the text won’t activate the link or secondary navigation, but below the text will).  Just in case we were wondering what we just moused over, Tim has included large duplicate copy of what we just moused over.  I especially like how mousing over the correct area of primary navigation tells me what section (metro/region in this case) my current article belongs in *dripping with venomous sarcasm*.  Thanks for helping, Tim.  Why does this site make me feel as though I’m being treated like a tw0-year-old?

More secondary navigation?

Left navigation bar

So Tim created second form of secondary navigation… sorta.  The really bright blue thing along the left side (that breaks into the main navigation bar implying a strong relationship) is one form of secondary navigation.  Well, it’s more of a weak attempt to create quick connections to areas of interest.  A very weak attempt.  As we dive into articles and actually attempt to find content (gods forbid anybody wants content from a news site), the role and importance of that blue bar becomes increasingly strained.  In fact,  this makes it apparent Tim the Designer started with the homepage rather than the content page.  Apparently, Tim doesn’t think much of promoting content on the Paper’s news site (I realize the Paper is probably equally guilty of this poor product vision, but Tim’s job is to help keep the Paper on track… clearly, we can’t count on news papers to know anything about new  fads like the Internet).

I especially like how the links separated by bars (e.g., Today | Activities, etc.) only have a single space of separation.  That makes it easy to read and click to navigate the  small links (at least I think they’re links… they don’t look any different than the text, so I can’t be certain!).  Some of the links become slightly brighter when you mouse-over them (and I do mean slightly).  Some actually bother to add an underlying, which at least makes those links easy to identify.  In fact, there are at least five or six different ways links are treated throughout the page.

The calendar is bloody confusing.  It’s the 15th, but it shows me the rest of the week (so we can presumably see the future).  When I click on the 19th, I get a list of events for the 19th.  Okay, I can see a use-case for this one (congratulations Tim).  Unfortunately, despite being on a page all about the upcoming events on the 19th, my calendar still has the 15th subtly highlighted.  The calendar only shows me a week into the future, so I must not think much of yesterday’s news.  Sorry Tim, looks like you’ve failed again.

I’ll have another installment to continue describing how badly Omaha.com and Tim the Designer have failed.