CS3041 B18 — Bad

The example of bad design I have chosen from the WPI website for this assignment is the website’s main menu, pictured above. The first issue that I find with the menu from a design perspective is the way interactivity changes across links in the menu.

When hovering the mouse over a white link, the text turns yellow and presents an underline which is a nice way of identifying the link the user is about to click. There is however no change when hovering over the already yellow, underlined header links. This difference seems to imply a difference in behavior of the links that does not actually exist, thus overcomplicating the links by only partially applying the mouse-hovering changes across links.

The second issue I find with the menu is the lack of visual unity among the various headings. Though each of the other headings has some variety of subtopics, the “ATHLETICS” heading has none. From following the link, it can be assumed that this difference is because the link takes the user to a different website entirely. Nonetheless, the athletics heading stands out from the other links as a result. I feel that it is also worth noting that the lack of sub-links also seems without purpose as there are several intermediate links on the athletics webpage just as there are for the linked pages for other topics such as academics, research, and news.