WPI Faculty-Staff webpage design
The WPI Faculty-Staff webpage has a functional design, but it lacks what makes a webpage easy to use: a user experience (UX) design. To get a better idea of what makes the WPI Faculty-Staff webpage a poor design, I’m going to go over a few elements of good UX design and show where the webpage lacks.
Contrast
The first thing I noticed was that there was red on red title and listings in the main text fields.
They also chose to underline every listing under a title, assuming to distinguish them from the title, but I don’t think that this is enough of a contrast to separate the title and listing in a visually pleasing fashion. Instead, there could have been a clear color difference between the two with a bigger difference is font size to further separate the two topics.
Proximity
The designers spacing could have been a lot better. Some elements appear to be spacially alone with tons of white space around, such as the Suggest a resource link in the following screenshot.
While other elements seem to be grouped much to close in a clutter, like the lists of resources. I think overall that a through rearrangement of where the information is on the screen would help a visitor navigate the webpage with less difficulty.
Alignment
While most of the text is left justified, the rest of the webpage’s fields are not. the webpage (seen above) has most of its information centered to allow a nice symmetric effect when an asymmetric design seems more fitting. Because of the vast white space at the top of the webpage and the three columns in the middle being different lengths, using a left justified focus could allow for a more friendly drop down feel and that could allow a user to visually sort the information easier.
Notes
All images came from https://www.wpi.edu/faculty-staff
