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Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, February 17, 2002:
Summary:
An early tweaking raised the Salt Lake City website to 70% compliance with homepage usability guidelines. Inside the site, however, task support falls far below medal contention.
Overall, the official website for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City scores poorly on compliance with established usability guidelines:
International outreach is poor, despite the international nature of the Olympics. A plus for the easy link from the homepage to French content, but a big minus for the lame nature of this content (and the fact that the navigation stays in English even when you ask for French). The site scores 25% compliance with the 19 guidelines for supporting international users.
After the tweak, the homepage scores 70%, putting it into bronze medal territory (compared with a pre-tweak score of 66%).
Even though a relatively high score for homepage usability is laudable, it is striking how much lower the usability scores get once we get down and dirty with task-oriented parts of the site. This is a common mistake: Prestige-oriented design projects tend to lavish attention on the homepage, while neglecting the rest of the site.
Example: Even though the site has very good maps and seating charts, it is unnecessarily hard to find the venue you need. Each sport has a subsite with a main page for specific information. So far, so good. The sport's main page even has a prominent link to "venues," which is clearly the one to click if you need directions.
Unfortunately, clicking the venue link from, say, the ski jumping page, doesn't take you to a page for the ski jumping venue. Instead, you get a general map of the area, and you have to guess which venue is hosting the jumpers.
Low specificity in linking is one of the major causes of poor usability on the Web today. Come on, link directly from ski jumping to the hill.
Salt Lake 2002
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www.saltlake2002.com/ - 1k - 06 Feb 2002 - Cached - Similar pagesINTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE - PASSION - THE OLYMPIC ...
Français, WWW.MUSEUM.OLYMPIC.ORG, OLYMPIC MUSEUM
LAUSANNE The symbol of the union of sport ...
Description: Take a tour and see pictures of past olympics, hear about the Olympic symbols, learn about the ceremonies...
Category: Kids and Teens > Sports and Hobbies > Olympics
www.museum.olympic.org/ - 7k - 06 Feb 2002 - Cached - Similar pages[... three links skipped ...]
THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF THE OLYMPIC MOVEMENT
... Salt Lake City 2002 XIX Olympic Winter Games From 8 to 24 February, feel the emotion
of the first Olympic Games of the New Millennium in the heart of the ...
Description: [Official site] A variety of information involving the candidate and host cities, events, IOC policies,...
Category: Sports > Events > Olympics
www.olympic.org/ - 22k - 06 Feb 2002 - Cached - Similar pages
Which is the main, official site? Although the "International Olympic Committee" and the "official website" both sound promising, the actual Winter Olympics site seems the least likely, since its focus is apparently on promoting JavaScript.
Having multiple sites is a sure way to confuse users. When it's unavoidable, you must make microcontent, like page titles and search engine descriptions, very clear about each site's purpose.
One obvious issue that reduces usability for people with low vision: The site uses a fixed font size, so you cannot make the text bigger or smaller to fit your screen readability preference.
The cascading menus that blink onto the screen when you move your mouse around are annoying and difficult to use for all users; they will cause severe difficulties for anybody with motor skills impairments.
Because the Olympics are a major news event, I was looking forward to seeing how well the site would fare with the 32 guidelines for the PR areas of websites. However, the official site doesn't have any press or PR links, so I guess I should score it at 0%. I have no doubt that there is a big PR effort to support onsite media representatives, but what about smaller newspapers or specialized newsletters that cannot afford to send a reporter to Salt Lake City? The Web allows for much broader outreach than traditional media, and it's particularly good at supporting special interests -- like fans of the French curling team.