We’ve received a great response to our request for feedback on our initial home page designs from friends and colleagues both through this blog and in person. There wasn’t a clear “winner” or “loser” between the designs but we weren’t expecting that there would be. All of the designs have some good elements and bad ones and this process was mostly about seeing what those were for different folks.
To sum up what we’ve learned, people definitely have (sometimes strong) opinions about what does and does not make up a quality home page. Lumped into simple categories of what people want or don’t want to see it would look something like this:
Desirable elements:
- clear message
- easy (even simple) navigation, particularly top menu items
- uncluttered
- readable font size and style
- smart and catchy
- focused
- know where to look
- dynamic
- visually easy
Undesirable elements:
- clutter
- a feeling of not knowing where to go
- text that is too small
- cartoony
Elements that seem to be a personal preference:
- colours
- layout and location of various elements (news, service pillars, contact info, etc)
The next step for us is to take the feedback that we’ve got, both in the general as well as the specific, back to our designer for improvements to the design. As far as layout goes we’re going to work with a mixture of the best parts of design #1 (clean design, easy top menus, clear message, “the favourite”) and design #3 (colours, catchy, good layout). Of course we’re going to ditch a couple things that didn’t go over very well. We’ll post the updated design(s) in a post here in the next few days.
Thanks again to everyone for their thoughtful input and I hope you share some more thoughts with us when we post the next request for feedback.
Keith
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