today I’m going to pick on the new-ish Discover Tasmania website
I came across this site in my quest to look at every single tourism site in the world (don’t ask… it wasn’t my idea). Its pretty new. I know this because when I started my quest the Tassie tourism site looked very different to how it does now.
The first thing I thought when I saw this site was – wow! Finally someone has made a sexy tourism website. Hoorah.
Then I started using it.
Oh, the disappointment when I discovered that they’d actually only designed, properly designed, a couple of the pages.
Actually… the problems started before then. First up, if you’re looking at the site using Firefox, chances are that you won’t even see the pretty Flash ‘intro site’ (its more than a splash page)*. I can only see if it I’m using Explorer (which I rarely do these days… mostly when sites won’t work properly in Firefox). Just say you do get to see the Flash-y bit, then you’ll quickly find some navigation elements that fly up from the bottom of the page. Tricky little buggers, aren’t they. Very hard to control. I wonder if anyone ever did any user testing on them? Couldn’t think so.
Find your way to the main site, and you’ll see a few surface pages that are quite pretty. Get down to the actual content and it all goes to hell. As usual, its the 3rd tier pages that Just don’t seem to have been designed. Why go to all the trouble of Flash homepages and then let it all go when it comes time to deliver on the promise?
See this page? Who designed that content? Oh, I know. The developer probably. Or, wait, someone chucking content into a CMS template. No one would deliberately design that content like that, would they?
How does this happen? In my experience, its one of three things (in reverse likelihood order):
a) whoever designed the site got bored with the detail stuff having started with designing the homepage and juzzy Flash stuff. (which reminds me of what I was thinking about the other day re: when to design the homepage)
b) whoever designed the site didn’t/couldn’t get hold of the content within a reasonable amount of time from when the site had to launch so as to allow them to design the content. (in which case we can blame project managers and/or clients, but also non-feisty designers)
c) whoever designed the site was given a ridiculously short amount of time to design the site and the only pages the client really cared about were the homepage and, if you’re lucky, the next level pages.
I know as well as anyone, that in most projects the circumstances are far from ideal, but the problems on this site are ones that I think are really symptomatic of a lack of user testing, a lack of interest in user experience, and a lack of interest in content. In this case, some really basic rules are broken – including my pet hate – sending me off to another site without giving me any indication that you’re going to do so. Argh, I hate that.
Its all a bit disappointing, because we should all really know better.
And yet, its still probably the second best tourism site I’ve come across.
Have you seen any better?
* Updated – actually, I’ve tested the site using Firefox on another PC and it seems to work fine… strange. I have Flash installed for Firefox on my laptop but, nada. No go with the Flash. But it seems that its not just a Firefox thing, so I take that back.