I recently got back from the DUX 2005 conference in San Francisco. The conference lasted from November 3rd to the 5th. While I wasn’t completely enthralled with DUX as a conference, I found it’s website worth noting.
So here’s the background. It’s about 8:05 a.m. and I’m hurrying to get ready to leave by 8:15 a.m. for an hour and a half journey north to Fort Mason in San Francisco. I needed to get some quick directions before I left, “No problem!” I thought as I shook my mouse to wake up my PC. “I’ll simply log on to the world’s finest website ever, get a map and be off.”. Well what would you assume from a website created for a user experience conference in heart of design central (aka San Francisco)?
While the DUX website certainly looks nice, it had to be one the worst and most frustrating websites I’ve used in quite some time. Let’s take a look shall we?
Now where would you go for this information? I had little idea. Not only was the homepage overly text heavy, but the navigation was confusing and verbose. In fact I would say that other than the first link, the other 6 links are useless to the majority of visitors or ambiguous at best. Surely with a simple conference site, we could create a more user-centered architecture. So here’s my 2 minute stab at a new 2006 DUX architecture.
Hopefully this next year DUX organizers will practice what they preach, or find a volunteer to do it for them.
Published on November 9, 2005
Resides in User Experience
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6 Responses to “Pot Calling The Kettle Black”
1
Matthew Anderson on November 16th, 2005
I have similar issues with Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com. As a usability expert, he certainly appears to know what he’s talking about. Yet, every time I attempt to find something on his site, I can’t help but be bombarded with contrasting colors and way too much text
2
ryan on November 16th, 2005
Yeah no kidding. To this day it completely baffles me how something can have poor legibility or design yet be considered usable. They really are married at the hip and cannot be seperated as far as I’m concerned.
3
Matthew Anderson on November 16th, 2005
I agree. A web site is nothing without good content; however, it’s just good content without a design direction.
By the way, the new site layout is solid! Clean and refreshing, though I expected nothing less. Although I have to admit, I do miss the picture of the apple/orange bound in twine.
4
ryan on November 22nd, 2005
Thanks for the comment! Yes, not the first person to mention that to me. Perhaps I’ll try to bring it back. Although it’s getting quite withered and moldy by now.
5
James Myers on December 21st, 2005
Obviously DUX doesn’t give a rats backside about enhancing the experience of their website even a month after you posted this great post. I respect and admire people like you who really get it. I will never attend a conference in this category that doesn’t take their website/experience seriously. They should listen so they don’t lose even more credibility/image.
6
Selin Mani on November 19th, 2006
User exeperience seems a junk word, which making more fuss to the customers and doing nothing to improve the expected user expereince, though designers and developers are trying to put more effort.