Random Sites and Snap Judgments

January 19, 2004 | 3 Comments

You might have to bear with me on this one, I’m feeling a bit ornery today. I think my whole back problem is making me a bit stir-crazy.

I’ve had two things on my mind this morning, which has only just begun. One is the Web award extravaganzas down at SXSW and the other is the nagging question (over which I’ve debated hotly and frequently of late) of what makes a Web site successful.

So I figured I’d let the mad scientist in me go wild and combine the two.

What I did was head over to SXSW Interactive’s Web awards page, hit up the always fun, educational and entertaining Web Awards Randomizer and take a look at some sites! Below are the sites I came across, in order, and my snap judgment.

What I was trying to do here is see, as someone coming in cold to a site, if I could easily get around the site, know what it was about, etc. Many users come upon sites this way, either via search engines or by following “blind” links.

I know there is much more to a site that what one can tell right away, and it might not be entirely fair to make snap judgments on site without knowing the goals and the audience. However, these sites have all been entered into a Web awards and are likely to get judged over and over in this same manner — and, like I said, I’m feeling ornery — so I’ll apologize now for any offense this might cause.

Here we go!

#1 — Popular Front : SnowDays — It took me a minute to figure out what this was. Then I remembered hearing about it. It’s a snowflake creator! Fun. Nice design, easy enough to use. Got me to click though to see who made it. That’s a plus, right? Over all a very good site.

#2 — Chalk — I knew right away that this must be some kind of band site. I went into the Flash version. Not too bad. Except I couldn’t find any music to listen to at first. The sub nav is less than obvious. If I’d not have been motivated I’d have gone elsewhere right away. Otherwise I suppose it’s not half bad.

#3 — Wefail Lovers — Another Flash, well…something. I’m not sure what the heck this is. Is it a band? An artist? I’ve got no clue. I spent quite awhile watching it though. I even clicked around a bit. Still no clue. Oh well, it’s interesting at least.

#4 — ReachCustomersOnline.com — A internet consulting blog. Nice design, easy enough to get around. I can easily tell what it’s about. Since this is just a snap judgment I didn’t read the content or anything, but it sounds interesting so I bookmarked it for later. I’d say that counts as a successful design huh?

#5 — Sister Someone — Another Flash-based band site. Pretty average, but not too hard to figure out. Nice photos. I found the music easy enough although the “buttons” were a bit tricky and what’s worse the pop-up “player” didn’t seem to work at all. Too bad, I was interested in hearing them for a minute, now they lost me.

#6 — Fistful of plooble — A personal blog. Pretty straightforward, except I’ve got no clue what plooble is, I don’t know him and I’m not sure what he’s writing about so I’m going to move on without further comment.

#7 — Ric Stulz — My first impression that this was a portfolio of sorts was right. The splash page worked I guess. It took a minute to figure out how to get to the art, mainly because the site doesn’t render right in Safari, but once I got in I found some really nice paintings. This is another case of “if I’d not been motivated, I’d have left” — nice artwork, hard to use site.

#8 — M-80 Films — It’s a Flash site. A portfolio maybe? It took me quite awhile to find the navigation. I couldn’t read the bio at all, the text was too light, but I watched their reel for about 10 seconds. Looks like they do good work, might think about making their site a bit more straightforward, even though the design is generally nice. I hate to have to think about how to use a Web site.

#9 — Fluid Resolution — First impression is that this is another Flash portfolio but the text is too damn small and I can’t figure out how to launch it right away. Oh, duh, it’s got a button right there, my bad. Once in, the short little “intro” is pretty cool, like the design, feel and music. I explored around, and as these Flash portfolios go this one is pretty good, it’s easy to navigate. The only problems being that the content area is blank to begin with and the text is really small — but then again, who comes here to read this stuff anyway? He’s obviously a very talented designer and that comes though fairly well, so overall I think it’d be considered a success.

#10 — Jagun Fighters — This one was kind of fun. It’s another Flash site. I think it’s for some kind of action figures or something, although at first I wasn’t sure. It’s got a nice, targeted design and the navigation isn’t too hard to figure out. It even highlights it really quick when it’s done loading. I’m quite sure this site is very audience appropriate as well. It’s got a little fighting game complete with instructions. Overall, I think they did a good job on this.

I think I’ll stop there. Wow, 7 out of 10 were Flash sites. Then again, I think this might simply be the nature of the categories in the contest and the type of folks SXSW attracts. Lots of entertainment, art and music sties — a natural fit for Flash based work.

Even so, it did seem like I had to do quite a bit of thinking to get into most of these. It would seem that some of these could benefit with a little user testing, maybe make them a bit more straightforward. This could be easily done without sacrificing any aesthetics I’m sure.

So, what’d we learn from this little experiment? Not much I’d say. Maybe it just reinforces that context and audience is very important to the success of a Web site. In any-case it was fun.

Filed under: Web Design