Week 4 – Least Favorite Websites

My least favorite website is the intranet for my last workplace.  Aesthetically, it is pretty bland and not very exceptional.  Functionally, however, there were some issues.  The most common complaint from users was “I can’t find anything”.  This was true for me as well, even though I helped upload information to this intranet.  In theory, this intranet was set up fairly logically. There are tabs on the top of the page.  Pull down menus under the tabs help direct the user to more specific topics that they are interested in.  And then each page is set up with sub-topics.  Some sidebars contained common links and helpful tables.  All the pages are set up similarly, so that if an user is used to one page, they should be able to navigate another page.  However, in reality, it was very hard for people to find any information.   One of the reasons is that it requires a lot of recall on the part of the user.  An user will have to remember exactly what department (tab) an subject fell under and exactly what topic (on the pull-down menu) where they want to go.  If the person that uploaded the information classified it under a different department or topic, then the user will be looking in the wrong place.   The intranet simply grew more and more cumbersome as more information is loaded onto it.  There were some improvements made through user feedback and certain aspects of the website were simplified.  However, it became an cycle where things will get simplified for awhile and then the intranet will grow again.

Aesthetically speaking, some of my least favorite websites have been news websites lately, especially the ones tied into TV channels.  They have become so overloaded with commercial ads, video links and graphics that they are just information overload.  Sometimes the titles of the news articles are very sparse and they rely on the pictures attached to articles to attract clicks.   Of course, that is not to say that there aren’t interesting videos or other news items linked to the website.  It is just very hard to scan through the websites to find the news articles that is of interest to me.  I’ve found that some news aggregators or websites based on print news organizations are somewhat less graphic intensive and easier to browse and take in information. Native advertising is another issue that becomes more and more troublesome to me.  Because some websites intentionally makes it hard to distinguish betweens news and ad, it makes the website less useful to me.  With native advertising, they are not really fulfilling their functions as “news” websites.