UI Review Wk 3: Time Tested Books Webpage
Time Tested Books’ website has failed the test of time. Excuse me, their Blogspot, has failed the test of time. For context, this store is a Sacramento fav. They are the official booksellers for Fairytale Town and CapRadio Reads, which to me indicates that they're an established part of their community. The storefront itself is cute and cozy, with exposed brick walls and lots of plants and clutter. The location is downtown on K street and they get a lot of foot traffic, which is maybe why their website is so bad.
So, here is the landing page. It’s the first thing you see after you click the link from your search engine to your website. What is that grey box supposed to be? I wonder. Also, the “Time Tested Books” is underlined which implies that it’s a link, the word “enter” beneath is unnecessary and confusing.
The landing page links you to the TTB Blogspot page. It looks ugly, cluttered, out-dated, and incoherent. The aesthetic doesn’t feel intentional at all.. more like someone started this Blogspot resentfully and just picked the first template they saw. They’ve got text in lots of different colors leading nowhere. The blue and yellow (sooo readable) made me think, as a user, that those might link me to something. They don’t; they’re just text. I also dislike that the words on the tabs for the content in the center disappear for whichever page is active. It would be better to be able to see the title of the page that I am on while I am on it. I wanted to explore the things on the right-hand side of the page. When I clicked the Fairytale Town link it brought me here, to a broken link:
Links launching from this website to others don’t open in a new tab :( This is frustrating, especially if you don’t notice at first, because one can lose track of their web page that way. Within a site, I don’t expect a new tab launch, but if a link is taking me to a completely different website I don’t want it to override the main page that I am visiting. So we hit the back arrow and get back to Blogspot page. The other two links on this menu did work.
After exploring the links to external websites, I check out the tabs being used to organize the content on this site. Here we have another poorly designed page with a ton of text and limited interaction. The images are real hard to see because they’ve got such delicate writing and they same to have been rendered in pencil. Above them, text reads, “click on images to enlarge”, which I do. Surprise! Nothing happens.
I don’t know what to say about this page. It offers no new information, it’s not cute, there aren’t any images and it provides a link that is already pinned on the right-hand side of the interface. To be fair, it is an important link, because, although this is Time Tested Books’ “website” one cannot shop their inventory here. They have to visit yet another website to browse and order books online. That’s three websites you have to visit just to shop TTB. The landing page is a .net that links to their Blogspot, their Blogspot links to another website where the user can purchase goods.
There’s not much to say about this one that I haven’t said yet. It’s still ugly and cluttered and more of the same, and look at that, another link to AbeBooks. I guess I’ll check it out.
Before we leave this site, let us take a moment to acknowledge the issues and discrepancies in formatting for this menu. I would icons for each site in all of the same shapes and sizes to help with consistency and I would pick a single type face that doesn’t look like a link from 2004.
I’m not going to go into a full critique of this site, but it’s not really doing the most here, either. On top of that, I think the groupings for book collections aren’t really offering the information readers want. For example, “books about Africa” could be anything from atlases to novels. When I go into a book store I’m looking for things like, “philosophy” or “fiction” or “reference”. These are more common categories, no?
I’m just getting lost in catalogs now. Each time you hit “show more” you get 6 more collections, and then at the bottom of the page there are more catalogs and separate links for browsing. I think it’s also worth mentioning that AbeBooks has loads of inventory from different sellers, so sending customers to this site might mean they find a better deal on a book from another seller and then TTB loses a customer.
Time Tested Books is a small company that probably doesn’t have a large budget for design. That being said, there are plenty of simpler and more affordable solutions that will improve the customer experience so much. First off, TTB needs to consolidate. One website for their info and inventory. They’ve been around since ’81 I think it’s finally time. Second off, the site needs a system. Links should all look the same, headings should look the same, buttons should look the same, etc. I would delete the “Rare Books” tab since it isn’t telling the user anything. I would also consolidate all of the links on the left-hand menu into a tab called “clients” or something along those lines. I don’t think it needs to be so available and it’s just adding more clutter to the website. Also, get rid of this massive background the inhibits economic use of space. It doesn’t add anything to the site.
