Improving the RDS.ca homepage

Let’s look at how a heuristic or expert evaluation — comparing a Web page against a list of globally accepted usability standards — could help improve the homepage of RDS.ca, a popular sports news site. Heuristic evaluations are very practical because they allow designers to take a step back from their designs and find quick ways to improve and optimize.

The goal with these kind of evaluations is not to critique but to help improve the user experience. RDS.ca does several things right: content is properly categorized and archived, sections are color-coded, the Website can either be searched or browsed, the navigation is straightforward, etc. However, there’s still room for improvement.

Current RDS.ca homepage

Let’s point out some of the issues that came up during the evaluation. For the prupose of the exercice, we’ll focus on the most important issues.

• Visibility of system status: Although the main navigation works well, a link to the homepage needed to be added. The only way to go back to the homepage was by clicking on the logo.
• Recognition rather than recall: In any interactive system, we try to keep the number of different interactive elements (eg. links) to a minimum. RDS.ca had over 15 different link types (text links, buttons, etc), we brought it down to half. The more link types there is, the more difficult it is for users to know what is clickable or not.
• Consistency and standards:
  • The header lacked “tightness”. Expected information (search box, profile information, font controls, etc) was positioned all over the page and hard to find. We improved the findability by grouping related elements.
  • Animated banners located next to each other decrease efficiency and clickthrough rates, we separated them.
• Aesthetic and minimalist design:
  • Elements were not properly aligned for optimized scanability. The page was too busy and chaotic. Switching to a 3-column layout increased white space and made the information easier to find.
  • Overall, the page suffers from a lack of focus which is a typical problem found on big content-oriented Websites. Everything on the page is competing for the user’s attention (bold text, colors, buttons, headings, animated banners, etc). Finding out what users are really looking for and trying to accomplish on the Website’s homepage through analytics, a questionnaire or usability testing would really help to straighten out the layout. Our guess is as good as any at this point.

New RDS.ca homepage

Our redesigned homepage is clearer, lighter and more focused. Now, could it still be improved? Definitely. A more complete heuristic evaluation and a serie of usability tests could help identify the vast majority of design flaws.

When performing heuristic evaluations, we work with the designers to identify priorities and come up with solutions. We understand their reality and know that Websites are living, evolving entities. Our role is to give them the breathing room they need to re-evaluate their designs. It can always be improved!