Yale School of Art
The Yale School of Art’s website is infamous for having a terrible interface (fig. 1). Digging a little deep you can find that the website’s bizarre appearance is a result of the designer’s decision to make the page changeable for anyone in the department (fig. 2).
Any criticism of the website has to then be independent of the fact that it looks weird, as that was the express purpose of the design. However, turning the website into a pseudo cork-board does not allow it to get away with bad design choices. The navigation menu along the left is full of poorly formatted tabs, which makes them difficult to read at a glance. Any tabs with multiple words are sandwiched together into one word, such as “FacultyAndStaff”. The main page also contains a “upcoming events” section, which appears to be built as a text box and not linked to a calendar, as events from weeks ago are still present. Prominently displayed on the main page is also a poster for an event, but licking on the link only leads to a jpeg of the poster and not more information on the event (fig. 1). Similar problems with inter-connectivity plague the rest of the website as well. For instance, the “undergraduate” tab leads to a list of courses open to undergrads titled “Undergraduate Majors”. Actual information on the majors are found in the “Study Areas” tab. The courses listed under majors aren’t even clickable. To get to the actual list of courses, you’ll have to go to the courses tab, where a lot of the same courses are listed again, but this time they can be clicked for more information (fig. 3). This type of illogical hierarchy and redundancy only serves to make sure the user’s navigation and accessibility is poorly streamlined. Similarly, hyperlinks randomly work or don’t work across the site. One some pages, every hyperlink works fine, while on other pages hyperlinks to other sections of the site simply reload the current page, or do nothing at all (fig. 4).
Obviously, this site was built half as a joke/collaborative art project and half as a real department website. However, it fails to deliver as a useful site because of it’s lack of logical structure. My attempt at a redesign would focus on making sure every part of the site is streamlined for navigation. Everything that can link , does so. Everything that is labeled a certain way should actually contain that information. Overall, just a focus on organization and making sure sections aren't redundant would help this site display both the creativity of the department and serve as an actual aid for others.
