Recently, the Belgian anti-cancer charity Kom op Tegen Kanker launched a new campaign, and used Drupal to create the website, LaatWatZien.be. While it is nice to see such a high profile site use Drupal, generally the site is not as nice as it could be, especially in the design department. This is quite a missed opportunity for a campaign in general, as well as surprising, given the number of large media companies involved.
Still, complaining doesn't get you much, so I decided to do a constructive design review of the LaatWatZien front page, and not only point out problems but also suggestions to fix them.
And because I recently started evangelising design in Drupal, I've made the PDF available for others to see and maybe learn from. I'll be forwarding this to the web masters as well, obviously.
Making such a review is easy if the you have the right tools. On Mac, I do the following:
- Using Paparazzi! (open-source), take a PNG screenshot of the entire page.
- Open the PNG in Apple's Preview.app, then save to a PDF. This enables the various PDF annotation features.
- Using the text box and oval tool, annotate the document, and save it.
The only downside is that the Preview.app interface is a bit spartan and that you cannot edit your notes after saving them. Still, it's easy and relies only on readily available tools.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Laat wat zien.pdf | 591.01 KB |
fleck for usability reviews
Fleck[1] is a great tool for usability reviews. Read a Dutch howto/whitepaper on usarchy[2], or see an example
ugh. I cannot post links, because of the spam settings.
[1] fleck.com
[2] www.usarchy.com/2007/02/lenen-nl-gebruiksvriendelijkheid/
review does get you more?
And there are a lot of other things you could put in your review....
Whenever I see such missed opportunities, my first reaction would also be, what if...
You say, complaining doesn't get you much.. but did your review get you any?
I once did this too for some new small sites and contacted the designers/web masters, but my experience is that they are not very eager to receive this kind of feedback. Most of the time I never hear anything about it anymore.
There should be so much more value in using other/peer (re)design feedback while the templates and mockups are actually in production, and not when they are live and payed for.
Groet,
Robbin
Ahhh that's why
I did look at the site several times, and showed it to me (female) family members... and everytime i show i feel a bit akward. Not because it's all about breasts, but because the site just doesn't look right and as such does not show the power of Drupal.
But thanks to your review, i finally know WHY it looks so bad.
greetz.
Reply to Robbin
Sorry, I missed your comment. I did in fact get a reply from the webmaster, which basically said that they had to build the site on a tight budget and time limit, and that they were inexperienced with Drupal.
They asked me to help fix it up, but I neither have the time nor the desire to hold people's hands.
They did apply some very basic fixes, but the biggest issues with the site still exist. Hopefully they'll work some more on it in the future.
I think the tone of the message is important though: I clearly said that I didn't want to bash them, but merely provide some tips to improve their site. If you give reasonable arguments, a rational person should not be angry :).
Reply to both
Gentlemen,
as I already said to Steven, I do want to improve the site.
And I'm not angry because you feel it looks bad :-)
I did try to improve the site using some of the hints. Still, I can't address them all, I'm afraid. But you now mention I missed the biggest issues... Do you mean the colors? The navigation tabs? The borders?
Changing the colors, is a hard one in this stage, I'm afraid, since all of the graphics use the same colors... Or do you have an easy way out?
The navigation tabs: what would you recommend?
The borders: how do I solve that?
Frank
By the way: can I subscribe to this thread somewhere?
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