Upa.org Interface Critique
Ultimate has been a big part of my life for the past five years. Although it is far from becoming a mainstream sport, Ultimate has gained popularity over the past few decades, expanding its reach into the collegiate and international scenes. Within the states there is a national governing body for this up and coming sport called the Ultimate Players Association – or UPA for short. Their website (http://upa.org/) serves as a central repository for sport development, score reporting, event sanctioning, and player registration among many other functions. For this blog entry I will talk about how upa.org violates many of the design principles of an effective site.
When a visitor first navigates to the home page he or she is essentially hit with a wall of text. The side navigation bar is overloaded with unnecessary links that could easily be organized into categories. The web developer tried to present sub-categories by indenting such items within the navigation bar. This proved to be highly ineffective, especially since he or she chose to use the same exact color, size, and font for all menu items. A simple and logical solution to this problem would be to utilize drop down menus. This would clear up the clutter and consequently provide quick access to the site’s pages. By not overloading the visitor’s capacity limits, he or she can briefly scan the navigation bar and navigate to a specific page without thinking, thus providing instant gratification.
Conversely, the horizontal navigation bar is nearly invisible as it is tucked away at the very top edge of the screen. It is almost obscured by the panel of images that run along underneath it. One possible solution is to swap their locations such that the links are underneath the images. Another would be to integrate it into the main navigation bar along the left hand side.
Furthermore, the hierarchy of information is a bit ambiguous in the right hand panel. The developer chose to bold section headers and use “bullet points” to define the subsections. Although this is one step better than its left hand counterpart, it still does not provide enough contrast to guide the visitor’s eyes. The developer should consider using color, positioning, size, and edges to clearly delineate the hierarchy.
As a registered player of the UPA, I often need to login for various reasons. Unfortunately the developer chose to turn this process into a scavenger hunt. There is no username and password input readily available on the main page. Instead it is buried somewhere towards the bottom of the side navigation bar. Apparently he was just too lazy to implement a two field form, or copy and paste a few lines of code he had already written for the separate login page.
Here is how my redesign would look like:
