Quote:
Originally Posted by sforman71
Thanks for the feedback.
What issues do you have with the site design specifically? The front page is still going through some design interations, and is probably two or three iterations from a final design. Our challenge is to bring forward the dozens of additions we've made to the site.
Just curious, What comments and changes would you make to these pages?
Sorry, the spam catcher won't let me post links.
The team index, the Redskin index and 1991 team pages, the Art Monk page.
We try to incorporate whatever feedback we can use.
I know that a lot of people liked the simpler preformatted text layout, which is the way I've designed for years. There were a couple of reasons for changing to tables. You can sort the tables very easily. Click any table header and the table sorts. It is more usable for mobile devices and for sight-impaired users as well.
I just don't see that big of a difference between the stats pages on ESPN and PFR.
Is it the green color?
Also, I apologize for the slow load times. Our ad company needs to pick up the pace. We'll get on them about that.
sean
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Sean,
Let me just start off by saying it's pretty damn cool that you would actually come here and solicit feedback. That gives you high marks in my book, not that you'd really care.
I don't usually consult for free, but I think it's cool that you'd come here and actively solicit feedback, so I'll throw in my two cents. I'll highlight some of the larger issues and try not to nitpick too much. As something of a side note, I do user interface design for a large media company, so I may be a bit more picky than most given that I do this kind of crap 60+ hours a week.
1. Navigation
The primary navigation gets completely lost in the shuffle for several reasons: the black background of "Football History" and "2007 NFL Standings" dominates from a color and size perspective and the eye is drawn there first, there is little to no whitespace or negative space separating the elements, and the navigation is not consistent, i.e. it's in one position on the splash page and in another on interior pages. All of this combines to make the main navigation hard to find, difficult to use, and lacking in continuity. If your navigation has the slightest issue you risk losing your users, lose your users and they're going to go somewhere else.
2. Advertising
The leaderboard ad spot (the 728x90 at the top) really lacks continuity with the rest of the site and is sort of "floating" by itself. It also does not visually align with any other element on the page and breaks the user's natural eye flow.
3. Visual Precedence
There is really no apparent hierarchy or precedence with respect anything on the page. What should I do first? Click on Players? Sporting News? Football Memorabilia? Should I search because the search button is one of the larger, more colorful elements? If so what am I searching for? Names? Games? Years? All of the above? Essentially there is no implicit direction as to what the user should, would, or could do on the site, as well as there being no explicit direction like "Hey click here to do such-and-such." The user is, by and large, left to figure out what to do by trial and error.
4. Overall Look and Feel
To be quite honest, my first thought when the site loaded was that something went wrong and a stylesheet got dropped. It just looked to me like something was broken. After refreshing a few times and looking at the code it became obvious that wasn't the case. Please don't take any offense to this as it's purely constructive professional criticism, but visually the site says to me "I haven't been updated since 1997." The colors are pretty bland and flat, the overall layout and architecture is pretty jumbled and the typography is pretty much nonexistent.
5. Whitespace / Negative Space
Whitespace is just the space that's between everything - it's not necessarily white, so some just call it "negative space." Everything feels very crammed together - there's very little padding at the outer edges, between text and borders, elements and other elements and around the navigation. It makes it difficult for the eye to separate what's important from what's not and it's tiring.
6. Deprecated / Outdated Code
I just gave it a cursory look, but it appears that you're using tables for presenting data that's not tabular in nature which is a real "no-no" nowadays. You're also using inline CSS which is nice in the moment but a real headache later on when you change things. Also, the semantics are ok in some areas and really lacking in others. Lastly, while it's not really right or wrong, the code changes between uppercase and lowercase with very little consistency. To be quite honest I haven't seen all uppercase HTML in years.
Out of curiosity, what is the backened database built on and what language(s) are you using to present the data?
Sean, I hope none of this comes across as overly negative or harsh. To be quite honest if I didn't care and didn't think you have a pretty cool idea going, I wouldn't have just spent the last 20 minutes typing all of this up.
Like I said earlier, the concept is awesome and the data seems almost unparalleled. The options are really limitless as to what you could do with it. It could really use, in my opinion, a serious ground-up reworking of the visual design and information architecture. The sky's the limit, in my humble opinion.
One last thing: a study by UCLA several years ago found that over 80% of internet users will make a judgment about a companies reputation, reliability and capability based solely on the look and feel of their website, and will do so in a matter of seconds. Basically you can have the coolest features, the best data and niftiest business in the world, but if you can present it well pretty much no one will care to even look. On the flip side, present something that people love to look at and can use easily and at the same time have awesome features and data and you'll have so much traffic that advertisers will stab each other in the back just to get featured on your site.
Like it or not we live in a visual world and people judge what they see.
Hence the reason guys like me have jobs