REVIEW: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution website

 

Recently, in an effort to better understand websites and their usability, I visited a website and a web page, and just spent some time looking at it to gather my thoughts on how this website functioned. I also asked one of my friends to do the same thing so I could gain a perspective that wasn’t my own. We each spent quite a bit a time browsing the website and both came to our own conclusions, however, they did have their similarities.

For me, I thought the website was very interesting and had an intriguing design. My first impressions were that the website had really cool graphics, using short video clips instead of pictures, and it was easy to navigate the story because I just had to scroll down. There were some portions of it that I didn’t think fit too well. For instance, there was purple in it that didn’t tie in well with the rest of it, also, there was auto-play on the videos that were featured, which is incredibly annoying when you start scrolling through a story and all-of-a-sudden there’s some loud sound going off.

Imagine this picture, but the swing is actually moving. Pretty cool, right?

For my friend, she did not like it from the start. She thought the video-pictures, which I thought were cool, were awkward. She also did not like the pull-quotes provided throughout, and she did not like the level of uncertainty when it came to what was coming next. There were some things she liked, for instance, she liked that the videos that were halfway through broke up the content and allowed to capture the attention that had been lost through the reading.

Now, we then started to browse the rest of the website to see what it was all about. It was actually fairly difficult for each of us to find our way out of the article page because the home button was very small compared to the rest of the story. It was a small little name of the publication on the top left-hand corner. But, once we found our way away from this one small thing the navigation was fairly simple.

Look at how much is going on with this drop down menu. That is way too many things.

For me, I did notice that the drop down menus were overly cluttered. There were too many different sections going on and they were incredibly small, so they were hard to read. In the initial page, it was easy because the words were relatively large, but they shrunk them quite a bit. The drop down menus were quick to show up, so that was nice, but they were loaded up. The rest of it was pretty easy to navigate otherwise. I did go to one page that I thoroughly enjoyed. I clicked on the drop down menu titled “Things To Do,” then clicked on “Movies,” and scrolled around. I liked this page because it showed all the movies that were playing in the area and then had a map of the locations of each of the movie theaters that were playing the movies. I enjoyed this and it was easy to navigate and enjoyable for me. Another positive thing that I noticed, was when I clicked on the rest of the website it actually took me to the rest of the website in a new tab, which as I’ve been told is a very good thing.

For my friend, it was a different story. One of the things that she did, that I forgot to do, was click on the social media pages. We both had the thought process that it would take us to the Facebook page of the website. However, instead, it took us to our Facebook and then gave us the option to share the website to our news feed so our friends could access this article too.

I can see how they might think this is a good idea, but I think that it ultimately would turn people off of the website because it is not what they would expect. It made me kind of mad because we wanted to get to their social media pages to find out more about them as an organization, instead it was trying to force us to share the story.

We did have a similar experience on one thing. We were both able to find the contact information for the publishers and editors within 15 seconds. It was easily found because it was at the top of the page under “Contact Us.”

With all of these issues taken into consideration my friend and I were not in agreeance. I thought overall the website was pretty solid, but she thought that it could be WAY better.

I guess it ultimately is up to the user. I enjoyed it because I thought the story was easy to understand, though both agree it was way too long, and the website was easy to navigate. My friend thought that the story was awkward, long, choppy and that overall, this could use a lot of work.

There are THREE things that we believe should absolutely be improved on.

1. For the story specifically, cut down the length. It is way too long and will likely lose readers attention. If you want to have a long story, maybe consider putting it on different pages that people can flip through.
2. For the website, increase the font size so that it is easier to read. It is way too small and there are too many words. Also, limit the amount of stories’ headlines available in each drop down menu. It should not exceed seven otherwise it is cluttered.
3. For the website, change the hyperlinks on the website so that when people click to view your Facebook or Twitter page, they are redirected to your Facebook and Twitter page. It is incredibly frustrating when you are forced to share something on Facebook.

Also, there are THREE things that we absolutely love and believe should stay the way they are.

1. 1. For the story, the moving pictures were the best part. They were comparable to GIFs, but they served a purpose other than just making people laugh. It also caught my interest right away.
   2. For the website, keep up the good work on the “Movies” section. If I were to visit a website to find out about movie times in my area, I would definitely want it to be like this one.
   3. Overall, both the website and the story page were very clean. So, I would recommend keeping it this way. Limit the advertisements. Limit the unnecessary stuff. Just focus on the content, because that is the most important.