What’s Wrong With

Dawn.com – What A Mess?!?!

dawn This is technically a “What’s Wrong With” post but I wanted to emphasis the new Dawn.com redesign. You can check it out here yourself.

Oh my! That is one ugly redesign. It gets even worst when I actually checked out the source-code. It is just pathetic.

Let me tell you why I think the redesign really sucks.

1. What sort of layout is this? The content is all over the place, there is no flow in the user’s reading and why is there a big advertisement banner between the menu on the left? They are still using TABLES? (I almost fainted when I saw that). The width of 780px is just not that fun, especially with wide-screen monitors it just looks ugly.

2. Color choice. Seriously? The color scheme is boring. Again, please do something with the lack of visual appeal

3. Where is my headline? Every newspaper has a headline or a developing story that they need (or want to) push out to the reader. It would have been better if they used some space (which they have a lot of) to showcase the latest developing story.

4. Navigation. Where is the top navigation? The top navigation provides the visitor easy access to different sections of the site. It also makes the top banner more visible to the user as that’s the general area they are looking at. You can even use two-level menu layout to maximize the usage of that space.

5. Tabbed content areas. When you have a lot of information to display on a page, usually a tabbed interface is preferred as it really cleans up the UI and makes it easier to read. This gives more control to the users over what content and links they see, and it saves space in the design.

6. Grid based layout? Coming back to layouts again, why didn’t they go with grid based layout? It is the most effective way to manage and organize large amount of content.

7. Popup windows? And that too for comments? What the heck are they thinking?!? enough said, I don’t think there is a single designer out there who would put commenting functionality in a new small annoying popup window.

I am really disappointed with the new layout and the redesign. It just doesn’t do justice to the content what-so-ever. I hope they work more on the site and scrap this redesign and hire someone who can actually design beautiful layouts.

General / UI Design / What's Wrong With — 1 Comment
30
Jan 09

What’s Wrong With: Lootmaar.com

I have been following (or at least trying to follow) lootmaar.com since I read about it on Jehan Ara’s blog. I have always wondering about the future of online auction in Pakistan. Ebay, as we all know, is big in North America and other countries. But they don’t provide the same service to those living in Pakistan. Lootmaar, wants to fill this gap and provide an online auction platform.

So today, I will be looking at the lootmaar.com site and give my two cents on the good and the bad about their UI.

Brief Overview:

The layout of the main page is a fixed width. I wonder why didn’t they use flexible width layout to provide better viewing experience. The user is presented with large tabs for “Buy”, “Sell” and “Sign in”. These three actions are important and the base principle for the site. Actually just the first two are the important ones.

They have various categories that users can post auctions under. A large “How lootmaar works” banner and quick link banners are also presented on the initial view. Scrolling down on the main page, gives us the “hot items” view.

The auction page is simple which three columns that provide picture, bid details and the seller details. Underneath it is the item description which is provided by the seller.

An interesting layout. Lots of white space and large font size.

So what about it?

Color scheme is nice and easy on eyes. Its mostly white so that’s not really an issue. The small FAQ type banner is very interesting and I think gets the point across. The auction page has the information in nice and easy distinctive fonts and colors which is easy to read.

The thing that bothers me the most though is the fact that the designer didn’t really design it for an auction site. Don’t get me wrong, the layout does not maximize the purpose of the site. Which at the end of the day should be the sole purpose of lootmaar.com

Let’s start by looking at the main page. The header is just a complete waste of space. There the tab for sign-in is just simply not needed there. I would have made the search box more prominent since that is what I would like to do almost 90% of the time.

The whole strip bar underneath the tabs are also not well placed. The search box repeats itself right away! And the two other blocks information are totally irrelevant for the user, I would rather offer them a link to a quick tour of what Lootmaar is.

Categories list on the left side needs to loose the circles and the width for this column needs adjustments. I would put the “One Rupee Auctions” and “Auctions Ending Soon” banners right above the categories list.

The list for hot auctions should be moved up a bit so that they are right there for the user to click and buy. There is a lot of wasted whitespace on the page. The three column layout for hot items section should be fixed to make space for at least one more column. The images are a bit too big for previews. There should also be a button for making bid right away on the item, currently this isn’t the case. I am sure this will drive their auctions up rather quickly.

The auction page for an item has an interesting layout as well. I think they could really really use a re-design on this page. The page fails to attract a user to quickly make the bid or instantly buy the product. The icon should be placed underneath the initial item description. The message for the user to login (to be able to place a bid) needs to move out from there. Rather this shouldn’t be on this page at all. The user should not be forced to register at all. See Lazy Registration Design Pattern for more details.

There is another odd panel that I saw on this page. When you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see a “Bid on this Item” section. Where there is a login form, right there! In the middle of nowhere!

Overall, while lootmaar is trying to bring a great service to people in Pakistan, it should also work on the UI development of their site. I strongly believe that just like any other e-commerce site, the layout for lootmaar.com can drive their user registration up considerably. What is rather more important than user registrations is user bidding. If they can get a user excited about a listing, by letting him find the product that he is looking for quickly, then their auctions will be more successful.

In the end I believe that lootmaar’s success is very much directly related to a successful auction. I wish them all the best for future and I hope they really do become the eBay of Pakistan!

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General / Pakistan / UI Design / What's Wrong With — 3 Comments
13
Nov 08

What’s Wrong With: University Websites In Pakistan

Well today I am going to talk about university websites in Pakistan. Today I am going to look at websites for three top (from my view) universities in Pakistan: NED University, FAST NU and LUMS.

Before I start here are some screenshots of all three:

OK this is where I have a problem: all of these sites look like a 12 year old designed them! Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of talented designers in Pakistan and being a university in this day and age, your site does matter.

I spent 30 minutes on each site to find some information and at the end just gave up. The amount of grammatical errors, visual errors and layout issues just turned me off completely.

There are so many things that I want to change on these sites that it will take me forever to list them all there. I will be doing a separate post for each of the site in coming days. BUT I also wanted to take this chance to openly challenge the talented designer in Pakistan to come forward and create a mock-frontpage for any one of these universities. Are you up for the challenge?

General / Pakistan / UI Design / What's Wrong With — 2 Comments
28
Oct 08

What’s Wrong With: Rozee.pk

Today I am going to kick start a new series on this blog. Its called “What’s Wrong With:”. In these posts I will be taking a look at a website (preferably Pakistani website) and give my 1 rupee worth of analysis on what are the good parts and the bad parts of that website.

My first target is Rozee.pk. Rozee has been a very successful job portal in Pakistan. I like to think of them as Monster.com of Pakistan. They are the place to go for job search. However, when I visited the site, I felt like a huge chunk of data was just thrown at me. I have taken a screenshot of the whole webpage. The page has a height of 2500px — that is ridiculous!

I have marked the image with few numbers (the awesome paint skills) which I would like to touch upon:

What’s with the side banner? I never understood why the heck do they have a side banner. It not only looks ugly, it is completely useless. Complete waste of space.
All this wasted space on the sides. Main content has a width of 776px which does not include that side banner. I would prefer that the site used flex width layout. That will not only make it look good on the new resolutions, it will also give more space for content.
Do I really care about all your top employers? Talk about wasting prime real estate. The list is huge! It takes the prime spot and conveys nothing to me. Yes all these top companies are hiring but really what does that tell me? Rozee should’ve listed a top 10 employers list in a carousel fashion with an option to see “more” if I needed to.
Hot jobs are not so hot. So the next piece of wasted real estate is taken up by “Hot Jobs” section. Again too much information cramped up into a small area and on top of that it tells me nothing about the job itself. The title for most jobs is cutting out and its very easy to ignore.
Recent Jobs. Ah, finally what I came to find on Rozee — JOBS! This list should be at the top of the site since these are the most recent jobs and most people looking for jobs are always checking your site day-after-day, this is the section that they are interested in. Which are the recent jobs that they can target.
Localize options. It is beyond my understanding why this little feature is sandwiched between everything else. This should be at the top of the site so that the user can easily customize the location on the whole site and everything else around me should be sensitive to this.

That was a long list. Overall Rozee seems to be doing a good job. I have been browsing around jobs on the site and it has a lot of them. It being the only major player in this field.

How can they improve it?

They need to create specific “activity centers” which will allow their users to be classified in different categories. For starters the two main type of users coming to Rozee.pk would be Work and Schools. People who are in universities/college/school would be looking for job and people who are already in the workforce would also be looking for a job. These two categories will provide a starting point to more targeted job advertisements.

They need to improve the UI layout. As always, the key thing in all UI designs is to keep it simple stupid (KISS). A rule that we should never forget.

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