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MIT website redesign(web.mit.edu)

5 years ago from Alexander Stocker, Founder

  • Nic TrentNic Trent, 5 years ago

    Genuinely curious what fundamental issues you believe are wrong. I wrote some things I like, don't like below. They were dealing with some interesting issues if you read the behind the scenes.

    3 points
    • Account deleted 5 years ago

      The page isn't balanced

      There are four different things competing for your attention

      Everything is horribly crowded (15"MBP screen)

      There is no clear heirarchy

      The tooltips obscure the links, showing me pointless URLs that I can't do anything with.

      The top nav disappears when you scroll

      Join us in building link doesnt provide any context, and seeing as the rest of the page is so confusing it makes me not want to click it

      When you click search in the top right corner, the animation is almost seizure inducing.

      That's just a few.

      4 points
      • Brendan Appe, 5 years ago

        While I agree there are some hierarchy issues (the smaller sizes address this, making search the clear priority) I disagree with some of your other points.

        The page to me doesn’t feel too crowded at all, and I’m viewing it on a 13” macbook. There is a search to the left, and image to the right with a headline peaking from below indicating scroll to read more. It feels clean and rather simple what my options are here.

        The URLs are not pointless, their URLs are very tidy. You can easily see if a link is taking you to news, an alumni page, the library site, etc. It potentially obscuring the link is really a non-issue, move your mouse.

        The top nav disappearing could be problematic, but it seems they’ve done a good job ensuring most pages aren’t very long so maybe they found it unnecessary?

        Your last two points are fair, though I assumed “Join us in in building a better world” had to do with their community involvement/volunteering efforts, which was correct. I could see including that on the homepage a client demand and them doing the best they could with the real estate provided.

        0 points
        • Account deleted 5 years ago

          But thats the thing. you have basically infinite space to use. They've tried to cram it into this weird split layout which has more problems than it's worth. They could've made it a lot cleaner and usable if they'd gone for a more traditional layout. It would solve most of the problems on this site. Form before function and all that.

          0 points