Question

Topic: Website Critique

Website User Testing

Posted by donalhealy78 on 4/25/2008 at 5:43 PM ET 250 Points
A web design company aee currently redesigning our company website. It is due to be completed in 2/3 weeks but before we carry out final editing we would like to get some opinions on it so we can incorporate these into final design before the site goes live. I would love to hear some tips, opinions, advice on what you think of it today and any changes you think we need to incorporate into it before it goes live. Main areas to review

What's your first impression of site?
Is it easy to navigate?
Do the pictures tell you anything?
How easy is it to book a flight / hotel
How easy is it to find information on your destination


Here is the link to the website - bear in mind its not quite finished yet

https://knockairport.u105.continuumdns.com/index.aspx
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Frank Hurtte on 4/25/2008 at 5:47 PM Accepted
    I like it. The pictures are appropriate, it seems to be laid out nicely. The buttons are well marked.
    on a scale of 1-10, I would score it a 8-9. Whats missing?
    There just seems to be a bit of color missing things seem very business like but not bright.
  • Posted on 4/26/2008 at 7:19 AM Member
    As a meeting producer, I look at travel sites from a little different perspective. I want easy to use sites. That being said, I really like what you have done. It looks good, is easy to use and gets the job done. I think you have everything covered. Good job.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 4/26/2008 at 9:16 AM Member
    Since you have the day & weather, why not also show the time. It might help remind foreign travelers.

    The BOOK NOW text isn't a link - but looks like it should. As a minimum, have it go to "book you flight now".

    For your mailing list: show the required fields. Why should someone tell you their street address for an e-newsletter?

    The route map is hard to read (use a thicker font or style for white text and/or switch to black).

    It's unclear what the difference is between "book a flight" and "book a holiday"
  • Posted by NatashaChernavska on 4/28/2008 at 1:19 PM Accepted
    Hi, Donal,

    In general the site is good. It's built with CSS, and is drawn professionally and nicely.

    I can give you some technical advice from the user experience prospective.

    It's very good that the technology your site is built with is CSS. In fact, it's terrific. However, the coding approach could be improved in the following.

    Try browsing your site with no style sheet. The designer has done a good job on creating a list menu and laying out the content for those who may not see the style sheets. The approach calls "Progressive Enhancement". Great. However there is a problem when it comes to image replacing.

    Say, for instance, that your users don't view images in the browser. Here we start getting a problem, because all your flight offers are presented as images and they are not supplied with the advertising text. Al those offers should have been coded as divisions with offer text in them, which would have been hid and overlapped with an ad image. That gives you visibility of the promotional offer even when user is not able to see images. That may be important in case of deaf people who browse websites using special software, which actually reads them the content of the page.

    Couple more ideas would be not to use a flash movie before the content, I would put it somewhere on a side.

    You also might want to place more text content on the index page since it's highly indexable by search engines, and it's well known that an index page has to have at least 200 words on it, which basically will be explaining your project.

    Unfortunately, the project does not contain any meta tags which are crucial for SEO.

    I personally don't like that user has to make another click to read 'More' about the website all that 'More' has to be on the index page, which in my opinion is crowded with too many images. Both increase a cognitive load and make your website less usable.

    Another think which increases a cognitive load is that there are two different main menus, which is a bit confusing: you make users think what to choose instead of giving them strait directions where to go to make purchase (book a flight). Besides, the very top menu us even repeated on this page: https://knockairport.u105.continuumdns.com/utility/aboutus.aspx
    which is absolutely not necessary.

    Even if we neglect those two menus, basically your user have to make another click to book a flight. That could be OK if you had thousands of flights. But even then you could put a block showing most popular flights right on the first page so users could make purchase immediately at entering your site. But the number of the flights is so little, so, basically you may put all of them on the first page and decrease cognitive load and increase sales at once just by doing that.

    So, in general the site is nice and has great potential, all mentioned mistakes could be corrected easily, all suggestions is also easy to implement.

    I wish you good luck with your project.

    Great job!

    Natasha Chernyavskaya
    of Artographica.com
  • Posted on 4/30/2008 at 11:18 AM Member
    Al those offers should have been coded as divisions with offer text in them, which would have been hid and overlapped with an ad image.


    Natasha,

    I was told that "hiding" text under a graphic gets people banned from search engines. How is that different from what you are recommending here?

    Paul
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