Usability Analysis
Obligatory paper assignment 2 – Usability Analysis
The website I have chosen to analyze is www.sol.no. It was actually a friend of mine who told me that he found the site annoying, so I decided to write about it.
It is logical to begin with the first thing you think about when you enter a web site, namely the site as a whole – the big picture. When I entered the site, I almost became dizzy. It was just too much; too much information, too many blinking images and way too many banners. You can not concentrate on just one thing whilst surfing on this site. On the main banner it says: “Alt du trenger på èn side”. That almost seems true, but perhaps having everything you need on one page is too much?
The first thing I would do to improve the site when it comes to usability, is to lose a lot of the big, frustrating banners working as commercials for other pages. The banner at the top of the page and the one at the right side of the page should be removed, because of their gigantic size. Or at least they should be minimized. They are both much bigger than Sol’s own banner, which should be the center of attention. It is understandable that they have agreements with other companies and sites to link to them, but their own site should nevertheless be prioritized. As it stands now, it seems that the most important thing on the page is the banners for other sites. In addition to the banners being big and taking up too much space, they are very distracting. To get the attention of the visitors is probably their main goal, but not negative attention. After seeing these annoying banners, with vivid colors and blinking images and text on them, disturbing me when I’m looking for something, I start to dislike the company responsible. The many bright colors on the page are also contributing to making me lose focus, so it would be a good idea to change that.
The menu on the page is too small, in my opinion. Normally the menu and the buttons on it are bigger, so that you easily can find what you are looking for. The reason for making the menu and the buttons on it so small is probably that there are so many of them that they have to be that small a size to fit on one line. It is possible that I would have substituted the current menu for a drop-down menu with fewer categories and larger buttons, hoping that it would make the site easier to navigate through. When we are talking about menus, it should also be mentioned that under the main menu, on the left side, there is a smaller menu with some buttons. I find this unnecessary and a bit confusing, seeing that a lot of them link to the same pages as the buttons you find on the “main menu”. Some of them are even under a different name, which is really confusing and in contradiction to Steve Krug’s first law of usability: “Don’t make me think!” As Krug explains in the start of chapter 1 in his book with the same name as his first law of usability, we should be able to “get it – what it is and how to use it – without expanding any effort thinking about it.” This is exactly what happened to me: I stopped for a while, trying to figure out the meaning of this second menu which seemed to be completely unnecessary. For instance I discovered that the button called “Bil og motor” links to the same page as the “Bil” button. If they want to put links to one page several places, it does not make any sense changing the name so that we as users become confused and wonder if it is two similar, but different, pages. I would definitely remove this submenu.
Sol’s web site does not use Breadcrums as an indicator of where you are at all times, which could be helpful for the users. And as Krug mentions in chapter 6 of “Don’t make me think!”, Breadcrums seem to work best if they are at the top of the page, above everything. So I would possibly add Breadcrums at the top of the page. However, I do not see it as crucial on this site because it seems as though one does not get lost that easily, seeing that Sol seems to direct you to articles on other pages. This way you do not have the possibility to mix yourself into a labyrinth of pages on the site.
Overall, the web site is okay. With some changes in design and layout I think it could be even better.
