In this issue

I was recently drawn to a web site of a rather trendy brand of Italian Restaurant and Food store. The site had some usability and accessibility problems and definitely had search engine issues. I thought it would make an interesting case study.

To protect the innocent I will call them Soprano's. If there really is an Italian eatery out there called Soprano's then sorry - but its not you!

Usability

When you go to the home page, the browser immediately spawns a new window which contains the body of the site. The window has no toolbar, no back button or print button, no scroll bars, no resizing. In fact a fixed size like a piece of paper.

I suspect the designer did this because he/she was uncomfortable with designing for a space that could be any size. The obvious solution is to fix the size and take away the tools that would allow me to change it.

I understand the motivation, but this approach brings some problems that the designer may not understand. For example, a surprising number of people don't understand the concept of 'multiple windows'. In a recent study, six out of 17 users had difficulty with multiple windows, and three of them required assistance to get back to the first window and continue the task after a second window had been spawned.

Accessibility

The look of the site is very appropriate to the brand, fairly up-market, quite small blue print on a darker blue background.

Unfortunately, small light blue print on a darker blue background doesn't hack it as far as accessibility is concerned. I can barely read it with my custom VDU specs. The visually challenged can set their browser up to ignore all this and just get the site up in times roman, big font, black on white. Of course if the text is bigger you need to be able to scroll the screen - but our popup doesn't have scroll bars.

If your visitor is blind, they will be using a screen reader that reads the text of the screen and pronounces it in a dalek-like voice on the PC speakers. Blind readers have a different problem - the navigation is all via images, and the text attached to each image just says 'click me'.

If they stumble onto the branch addresses they won't be able to read them at all because they are images without any corresponding text.

Accessibility is an issue that we should be paying more attention to. I will return to this in a future newsletter.

Search engine positioning

From a search engine point of view the site is a disaster area!

To refresh our memory about search engines. They all use a database that is constantly being updated by a program called a spider. If the spider doesn't find your page then your pages don't get indexed and your site doesn't get found. Because the Soprano's site produces a popup the search engine spiders don't get into the site at all.

Search in Google for 'Italian Restaurant in Ealing' they don't come up in all 5,100 results, but the Clay Oven does - and that is a great Indian restaurant.

Printability

How often have you seen people wandering about the streets with a computer printout of a map in their hands? You won't see anyone with a map showing them how to get to their local Soprano's because you can't print it because there is no print button on the popup window. They won't have copied the address into their address book either because the address is a graphic.

Does this site serve its purpose?

If I had a restaurant/food store chain I would primarily want my web site to bring people to their local branch. This means it has to achieve several things in succession:

1. Attract visitors to the site
   0/10 for search engines
2. Convince them that this is likely to be a nice place 
   7/10 for design and content 
3. Take them easily to the information they want
   3/10 for navigation
4. Keep them relaxed while they read the content
   0/10 for accessibility, 
5. Help them find their local branch
   3/10 - a map is generally less useful if you can't print it!
6. Leave them with a good impression of the Company
   2/10 for general frustration

Lessons

Lessons to learn are in my view: 

• Keep it simple - avoid gadgets like popup windows. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you have to.
• Keep accessibility in mind. It is not just the blind that have problems, your visitor may just have a poor quality screen. 
• Design search engine optimisation in from day 1 if this is going to be a requirement. 
• Keep navigation simple, consistent and usable

Lessons not to be learned 

• Guarantee a good result by hiring a specialist web design company with big clients and a big price tag.

This particular site was designed by a company (which shall also be nameless) with big international corporate clients and I suspect they are not cheap.