2007, Volume 5, Number 1
A Fish in the Hand is Worth Two on the Net: Don’t Make me Th
I’m speechless. Surfing the web, I stumble on a gem, a shining crazy jewel in a sea of common sense websites: Global Village, Institute for Appropriate Technology (“Your Portal”). My rhetorical “spidey-senses” begin to tingle. Appropriate Technology? What is appropriate technology? Where am I? I look at the URL and still don’t have a clear answer. I want to know more, but I can’t move my eyes away from the black and white picture on the far left. It is an odd, English-looking man in a bowler hat, white shirt, tie, and suit coat. He is holding a fish.I am a deer stunned in the headlights, far from the happy realm of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think! What on Earth have I stumbled upon? Could this be, perhaps, the best worst website I’ve ever seen? I’d like to explore these questions and more. What makes a good website? Why do we care? Why is website design important? Let’s explore. Grab your fish; we’re going for a swim.
To start, Krug gives us a golden rule for using the internet with his First Law of Usability: “Don’t make me think!” (Krug 10). He explains further: “It means that as far as is humanly possible, when I look at a web page it should be self evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory” (Krug 11). I apply Krug’s First Law of Usability to Global Village, Institute for Appropriate Technology and am completely lost. My eyes haven’t even left the first page. Okay, I know that the company is based out of Tennessee. I have one piece of information and build from there.
Basic stuff. I want to know what this company does. Global Village, Institute for Appropriate Technology is a non-profit organization (“Your Portal”). They’ve been around since the 70s. Check. I’m seeing flower children, tie-dye shirts, and the Grateful Dead. Maybe this explains the man with the fish. But the name throws me off: Institute for Appropriate Technology. These folks apparently research new ways of doing things, new technologies that are earth-friendly, ethical, and good for all mankind. A nicely typed introduction paragraph in the center of the page tells me so. But the man-holding-fish picture is directly to the left of the introduction, so I wonder about the connection. Is there one? “Think different” makes me think too hard, and we know from Krug’s book that over-thinking is what we don’t want for common sense web usability.
Websites should be organized, clean, informative, and easy to navigate; we don’t want to waste precious time. English 485: Writing For the World Wide Web is the class I’m taking at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo (ENG485, Richardson). I feel like I’ve paid attention in class, kept up on the reading, done some research and come at last to the Promised Land: finding Global Village, Institute for Appropriate Technology on the Internet was pure serendipity. The caption above the man’s head says, “Think different” (“Your Portal”). And I am, thanks to this class. The discoveries that I have made in analyzing this one website have crystallized my understanding of Krug’s text, Don’t Make Me Think, and clarified the discussions we’ve had in class.
I am convinced that careful attention must be paid to every aspect of a website’s design. It is important that the user finds the information he or she is looking for without having to waste time wondering where to go, how to get there, and what he or she might find. Krug says, “It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice” (Krug 41). It may sound like a contradiction--careful attention and mindless clicking--but it is not. Ideally, the website designer should be careful in his or her planning of the site so the user can interact with it intuitively, in a mindless manner.
The designer must be mindful about the overall package for the user to make his or her mindless clicks. Style, font, size, use of white space, basic organization, pictures, images, navigation tools and more are a few of the points that should be considered. As the old adage goes: “Failure to plan is planning to fail.” A fair comparison can be made to good writing of any type: We should not carelessly approach the blank page. The same could be said for web design.
Not only should the designer of a website be careful with the words he or she chooses and how they will appear on the page, the designer should consider how those words will be viewed rhetorically--what is being said, to whom it is addressed, for what purpose, and in what context. Rhetorical consideration gives the site’s message a much better chance of being understood. I would argue that logos, the message a site is trying to convey, is lost or diminished when a user experiences difficulty getting around. Not having to think about website navigation frees the user’s mind to concentrate on content--concepts, ideas, or products being presented online. Poor web design elicits the opposite of the designer’s goal to inform or persuade the user; it results in dissuasion.
How can we make sure a website is clear and our message is not lost? We can start by making some deliberate design choices. As designers, we ask hundreds of questions and consider the outcome so that the targeted user is not required to ask even 20 questions (Krug 41). So what went wrong with Global Village, Institute for Appropriate Technology? Let’s return to my basic list of criteria for a good website.
First, a website should be organized for our message to be properly understood. The website for Global Village, Institute for Appropriate Technology is so unorganized, it is almost humorous. The “Homepage” if you could call it that, is one long run-on page. Subjects are not grouped topically, alphabetically, or any other type of way; they appear randomly around the page. Images and graphics don’t seem to go with anything. My favorite mystery graphic is near the bottom of the page; it appears to be a tree wearing large diamond earrings. I’m not sure what that’s about and of course, there is no label on the icon to offer a possible explanation. It might be a corporate logo, but then again, it might be a tree wearing diamonds.
Second, a website should be clean. I’m not talking about a Windex, mountain air kind of clean, but the site should be orderly--tidy. If I had to pick a single flaw for the website I critiqued, it would be that the page was far too busy, incredibly busy. There are too many words, which as we learned from a class reading by Jakob Nielsen should be avoided (“How Users Read on the Web 1”). Good designers should be aware that website users don’t read the text; they scan it. Scanning the Global Village page might have been easier if key areas had been bolded or set in bullet points. Not only is the page text-heavy, but there isn’t much in the way of white space to rest the tired eyes of the user.
There are other issues with the tidiness of the website. Global Village has all kinds of images, icons, and pictures without labels. My husband, the computer programmer, calls this type of design flaw MM: Mystery Meat. What is it? Who are these people? Why is this picture relevant? Perhaps the designer attempted to throw the user a bone, but only one. There is a diagram for a conservation economy that the designer attempted to label. The words wrap around the image, but leave a single word to the bottom of the image all by itself. It looks to be a careless mistake and calls into question the ethos of the designer. It makes me think that either the designer didn’t care about the website or didn’t know what her or she was doing--not good either way.
Before I move to the third criteria for good web design, I must first address the choice of color and font in the Global Village website. I felt that the choices left the website looking cluttered, like a house with too many knick-knacks. In general, the font size was too small, making it difficult to read. Even worse, half way through the page the font color changes to light aqua. It seems to be a list of things the company has done in the past, but my eyes glazed over about six into the pale blue fuzz.
The third criteria factor for a good website is that it should be informative. Sadly, Global Village fails in this respect as well. So much information is presented, it’s almost overwhelming. Add to the volume that the information is not organized and the user is left swimming in a turbulent sea of facts, ideas, and concepts. The graphics, which should illuminate the information, make it more accessible to the user, are useless in the Global Village site because they are not labeled. Common sense should tell us that not labeling a picture, diagram, or image leads to confusion. Having random images around a website creates busy-ness and adds to page’s visual noise (Krug 38). In general, the visual noise on this website could be compared to that of a punk rock concert.
I would be remiss to leave the section on web page information if I didn’t address what was obvious to me when I first opened this website and saw the title: Global Village, Institute for Appropriate Technology. This web page and organization title brings up so many rhetorical questions that it staggers the already confused mind. What is appropriate technology? How is it that this odd-ball company has a handle on what can be called appropriate? And based on the basic layout of the webpage, does the user really believe the ethos of the company who claims to have a handle on technology and would put out a product as disorganized and (let me say it again) odd as this website? It begs the question: Who do these people think they are, and why should I believe a word of what they have to say?
I’m sure there are more, but the fourth criteria factor I have chosen to define a good website is good navigation: how a user gets from Point A to Point B on the web page. If I were to offer a letter grade for Global Village for their navigation, it would be a D- at best. As I mentioned before, the “Homepage” is basically one long run-on page that requires a user to scroll up and down. There are no navigation buttons at the top or along one side of the primary page. To get anywhere on the page requires scrolling. Not only does the user have to scroll up and down, but the page is larger than most screen sizes, requiring the user to scroll right and left as well. Krug talks about making things obvious, like buttons that can be clicked or not (Krug 37). Some things that appear clickable are not and vice versa. How confusing! The most obvious icon allows the user to click is the icon to donate money. Perhaps Global Village can afford to make revisions to their website once they have enough donations.
What does all this mean? Why the analysis of a website? The short answer is to point out mistakes (or good design elements) that others have made and learn from them. A better answer might be to spend time analyzing the specific points that work and don’t work to make a website effective and seek to do just that in our own work.
Websites communicate information. Although the user (the audience) is removed and not standing directly in front of us, we are nevertheless communicating. I’m all for individual thinking and innovation, but not at the expense of communication. I agree to a point with Global Village, Institute for Appropriate Technology that it is good to “Think different,” but I also think it is a very good idea to think smart. It doesn’t matter if you have ground-breaking technology, innovative stuff that could revolutionize the world; if you can’t communicate your ideas to others, it doesn’t matter. Fish or no fish, clear communication is key.
Works Cited
Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. 2. Berkeley: New Riders, 2006.
Nielsen, Jakob. “How Users Read on the Web.” useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s Website 01Oct1997 1. 19Sep2006
Richardson, Jennifer. “English 485: Writing For the World Wide Web - Praxis.” University of Hawai’i at Hilo. T/R 2pm-3:15pm, Hilo. Fall 2006.
“Your Portal to the Post-Petroleum Future.” Institute for Appropriate Technology. 20Sep2006. Global Village. 21 Sep 2006
This paper was written for ENG 485: Writing for the World Wide Web - Praxis. The assignment was to do a rhetorical critique on a website.