Shades Of The Nineties
Web Pages That Suck covered the mystifying navigation problem almost a decade ago. But it looks like people still haven’t gotten the message.
Take a look at the Acer Aspire One marketing website.
It’s like we’re back in 1999!
- Blob interfaces: The interface is one big Flash blob. If you do not have a Flash player, you have no way to get to any successor nodes in the web. (By the way, all Acer is using Flash for on this website is pointless animations, and you can easily do those outside of Flash. Look up script.aculo.us or jQuery’s effect library.)
- Shiny balls: Can you figure out what those mean? If you can, then you’re either sharper than me or know that Acer produces the Aspire One in those four colors. I thought it was meant to be some sort of range: left is the low-end, right is the high-end (called the “Aspire One” for some reason). No, that’s not the case at all: they’re all the same model. But there is no feedback to indicate this. If you hover over the balls then you get nothing to indicate just what they represent. The problem is compounded by the replacement of the mouse cursor with text reading “Select your one”, which is ambiguous — you could be selecting a color scheme or an entirely different model. The only way is to click and guess!
If you’re ever asked to design a website, please don’t put design ahead of functionality. Aside from being a hinderance, it’s no longer trendy to be obtuse.