February 04, 2003
Review of Identify Web Site
Liquid home page, with lots of moving text and animations, all of which offer no increase in the usability or effectiveness of the site. The main navigation, which is minimized and recedes into the layout of the page, moves making it potentially hard to find in relation to their items that do not move on the site as it liquefies. The home page is liquid but its minimum width is still above 760-800px standard of most users, but yet under 1024px the next most used mention size up, meaning they are under utilizing and miss managing screenspace. In fact at an 800x600px window almost every element on the page is cut off somehow, which is a statement on the lack of focus the site has.
Graphically the heavy use of stock people in overly used, overly posed positions, looking at a dot from the company logo turned into a kind of bean shape is irrelevant, and a bit embarrassing. It takes work for the user to figure out to connection, it is not readily apparent what it is supposed to mean, or even if it is supposed to look like it does. It looks more like a pill than something that has to do with software testing, it is used for headline keys, flash animation, and other random nonsense, which make a misguided, diluted statement about the logo and brand message from the company.
The content on the home page is organized rather haphazardly, the scrolling list of customers in the "Over 2,000 Customers" section is a terrible idea, and a horrible implementation, it is the most active item on the page and therefore draws attention to it, yet the user cannot stop it to look at something that has scrolled by, cannot click a particular logo or fast scrolling company name, or even click the entire item to get anything if they are interested in Identify customers.
Home page event items in some cases link directly to the event site in a pop up, which is a good way to loose visitors directly from the home page. News links go directly to PDFs with out warning and present another barrier to site entrance. All over the site, links lead off the site, to not HMTL content and do all these thinks with out giving the user any warning, and leading to a disorientation and apprehension to using the site.
Left navs on the site change and do not reflect user pathways into the site. Case in point is the News section under the about section, choosing About from the main nav and then News from the secondary nav, leaves you unable to get back to anything in the about section, unless you are able to see the tiny breadcrumb crammed in the upper left of the content section of the page.
The right hand resource material available from interior pages, such as the solutions > support page, do not offer the user with context relevant resources, links lead to general news and general downloads, making the user do more work than necessary to the figure out what to do once they have found what they want. Having this information so content neutral makes it utterly useless after the first viewing, it is all information that should be available to the user through other pathways and if content does change there, it is likely to be overlooked by the user.
This one is overall one of the worst I have seen in a while.
Comments
I agree man, I about had a seizure trying to take in that site at first blush. I think you make a good point about the links not warning you that it is sending you to a .pdf page.
Something I noticed was that the "Sign up for the IdentiFYI newsletter!" heading looks exactly like all the headings that are links on the page- yet it's not a link- inconsistencies like that bug me.
I bet the bean looks pretty cool through the telescope.
~Lee
Posted by: Lee | February 4, 2003 03:55 PM