Mobile phones are fucking up websites

[Epona]

Plus one. The U of B site is how things should be done, and the second one is basically fucking dreadful; tables, iframes, SHTML ("[an error occurred while processing this directive]" is so retro) etc.

Actually there is one major flaw in the U of B site - the first thing you see when the page loads is text on top of a photo, with a hard line (formed by where the building meets the ground in the photo) right through the middle of a line of superimposed text - which is utterly fucking dreadful for anyone who has a visual impairment, and should have been spotted and changed for reasons of accessibility.

 

[Brainaddict]

Plus one. The U of B site is how things should be done, and the second one is basically fucking dreadful; tables, iframes, SHTML ("[an error occurred while processing this directive]" is so retro) etc.

I'm not defending that second one, but what's good about the U of B site? As bioboy says, the front page contains almost no information and is unlikely to get you where you want to go. You have to scroll down four screen's worth of images to see a handful of links. It may be in fashion (and haven't I noticed it's in fashion - I see designs like that everywhere, like dogpoo) but I don't see what's good about it. The fashion will change in a year or so and people will laugh at this stuff. It offers a very poor user experience, and hopefully some good A/B testing and user surveys will weed out this info-light dross fairly quickly. Or maybe it is what people want, but they also want The Great British Bake-off. You can't trust people.

 

[two sheds]

Or maybe it is what people want, but they also want The Great British Bake-off. You can't trust people.

Sites need a setting "I like unnecessary fucking mouse scrolls and clicks Y/N"

I think it's down to designers wanting to give a unique customer experience I don't want a fucking customer experience i want to get to what I want quickly thank you.

 

[Epona]

I have lived in Newham since 2001, but am still trying to fathom out how to find anything I may need to look at on their nicely designed pretty website (yes, it looks great but I can't fucking find anything on it)- and just recently they removed the 'add to basket' facility for payments, so I need to pay 2 bills separately every month. Idiotic.

 

[two sheds]

Does the site look nice though? I think you may have your priorities wrong.

 

[mauvais]

Did you read the article I posted? I'm not sure where I fall on the form vs functionality thing but he's right on page bloat.

That UoB page is 2mb. Granted it loads practically instantly on a modern internet connection, but at 2mb, that's a hefty chunk of someone's 500mb mobile data allowance.

Let's say you look around the site a bit. It's another 1mb after you've click on research, then another 1mb to click on "research areas".

So you're now 5mb in and you're only at a menu of research topics that the university engages in.

Clicking on "Centre for War Studies" takes another 1.5mb and then you're at another menu...with another 0.5mb needed to see what kind of research they do in this department.

7mb to get to where you need to be. If you click the wrong link(s), it's going to be 0.5-1.5mb per page clicked. As well as being a shitload of data, that's gonna take a while, even on 4g. ~20s downloading, and the time navigating between the pages. Not great.

Mobile service providers compress all the images, so whilst this is still a problem, it's not quite of the same magnitude.