I really had an enlightening experience performing the trunk test on these sites. I can only hope that more designers take these valuable guidelines into consideration. There have been numerous times that I have gone so far into a website that I haven't been able to get back. Many times it is a website that I hit upon in google, so my navigation toolbar doesn't even have the original address. It's a very frustrating experience, and I feel following these simple design rules will make that frustration disappear.
The first site I applied the trunk test was to a site of my own choosing, the Phoenix Mars Lander site, in particular the multimedia page, which I found while reading about an upcoming event here at the University of Arizona. The Phoenix Lander is a project that is taking place here at the UA. The Department of Planetary Sciences has a mock Mars landscape and a prototype lander that it will test before launching the real lander in 2007. After printing out the site I found that it did a good job of holding up to Krug's acid test. The site had a clear ID, or at least I thought so at first. There is the big splashy bar that says Phoenix Mars Lander 2007, which will also take you back to the home page if you click on it-one of Krug's recommended details. However, above that is the NASA site ID logo, that, when clicked, will take you somewhere completely different and you can only go back via the back button, no persistent navigation. When you hover the mouse over it, though, the floating text says external link. And since the NASA site ID is much smaller, it seems to be only a minor issue. I would fix that by relocating the NASA site ID to somewhere that the user wouldn't expect the main site ID to be. The sections of the site are in the 'right' places, at the top and horizontal. The local navigation is also quite clear, I believe it helps that there is not much to navigate on this particular page. Speaking of pages, the page name is also quite visible and simple. It is a page that has the multimedia links for the site, and is simply titled 'Multimedia', both at the top of the page section, and in the You Are Here indicator. The Search box is clearly placed, however, there is no 'Go' button, or any button at all. This is potentially a problem for users who don't know that pressing the 'Enter' key will activate the search. When I was working with kids at the library, the browser that the library used did not have the Go button. This was extremely puzzling for the parents as well as the kids. If they can't even get started, how will they get anywhere?
I liked the site, so I clicked around a little more, and was disappointed by one thing. The sections on the left: For Kids, Students, Educators and Media & Press were clear, I thought. However, as the two screen capture shots will show, the For Students page and Multimedia page are two different sites.
The Multimedia page is an example of most of the pages that have persistent navigation in terms of the Phoenix Mars Lander 2007 site:
The For Students links you to a completely different website:
It's informative, but this page would fail the trunk test.
Food Network
The next page I examined in regards to the trunk test was the Food Network's party ideas page, except that it was actually the "Home Entertaining - Gourmet Cooking, Wine, Spirits, Holiday Recipes & Video Tips" page, which was not specified anywhere but in the title bar. But, failing that item, it held up fairly well to the trunk test. The only confusion the page caused me was in its local navigation, which was split between the left hand side column, some navigation links in the middle next to the ad, and finally more at the bottom of the page. I think they need to group these links together in order to make the page more user-friendly. However, one thing Krug mentioned that isn't part of the acid-test per se, is utilities. The Food Network seemed to get this right, since I love a page that will offer a site map. The site map allows for easier searching if I get frustrated by the navigational tools. I liked the page though, and might just try that German Cheddar and Beer Fondue recipe!
Backpacker.com
Backpacker.com's gear site was not bad, but probably my least favorite designed sites of the ones I reviewed. my first impression was that it was very busy. Many of the test elements were there, and this was one came closest to having a visible page name, GEAR@BACKPACKER, though the true page title was Hiking Boots and other Backpacking Gear form Backpacking magazine. Quite a mouthful! The page did stray from some conventions, but not in an illogical way. The local navigation links were grouped together, but in the center of the page, not on the left. The search box was where I would expect it and the sections were tabbed like the other two sites I evaluated. It did not have a You Are Here item, though, which would have been helpful. One unique thing it included, that I liked was the date. This implied to me that the site was fairly up to date. There was also a Back to Home button, but it was buried all the way down at the bottom of the site. Not many people are going to find it.
In relation to other information...
I wanted to tie in the trunk test with some of the other standards for good web design that we've been given. I am happy to say that probably none of these sites would end up on the Daily Sucker, or the top ten Web Pages that Suck, at least not in my layman's opinion. Unlike the Pope's page, the images were kept to a minimum, though backpacker.com was somewhat noisy. None of them seemed to have the dreaded 'Mystery Meat Navigation' either.
However, I did apply rule number one of the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). I was disappointed to find that the Phoenix Mars Lander search box was completely unforgiving. If they really want to make the site kid and student friendly, it would serve them well to have a less literal search box, or an advanced search tool. Backpacker.com had the same flaw. Food Network was better. For example, I searcher for 'toffu', and they came up with no results, but a suggested term. (It was toffee, but you take what you can get). I also misspelled caramel (carmel) and actually came up with some hits from that. From applying these other techniques, I can see that the guidelines for user-interfaces from different sources support each other.
In closing, I would like to give my support to what our recent speaker Joseph Boudreaux said, "We are hard-wired to use tools in certain ways". The trunk test certainly addresses that hard-wired facet, and I hope that more designers will put this truth into practice. When asked for my opinion, I will certainly keep all the design guidelines in mind.
References:
Krug, Steve. (2006) Don't Make Me Think. Berkley: New Riders Publishing.
Phoenix Mars Lander. Retrieved October 19th, 2006 from http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/multimedia/
Foodnetwork.com. Retrieved October 20th, 2006 from http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/entertaining
Backpacker.com. Retrieved October 20th, 2006 from http://www.backpacker.com/gear
Nielsen, J. (2004). Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). Retrieved October 13th, 2006, from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html
Flanders, V., Dean Peters. (2002). Web Pages That Suck. Retrieved October 20th, 2006 from http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment