The good thing about improving the usability of websites is that often it doesn’t take a huge amount of effort to drastically increase the usability.
For example, I was recently browsing the Australian Superratings website where you can purchase reports about various Australian Superannuation Funds and how they compare on investment returns, service and fees. I was curious about the price of the reports, but I couldn’t find this information anywhere on the site! I realised I had to commence the checkout process, which involved creating a new user account, just to find out the price of a report, which is very annoying and unnecessary.
Whilst navigating the site, attempting to find the pricing, I started to quickly get annoyed by the menu design on the left of the site.
The problem I have is that only two of the menu options are actually menu options, the rest are links, and it isn’t clear which two of the eleven are the options! So what happens is that I hover over each and every link only to realise that nothing is going to happen. The right pointing arrow on each blue box implies that it is a menu option that will display another option.
When I come across a menu option, the grey sub menu links all have a left pointing arrow. I am not sure of the purpose of this arrow as the sub menus disappear as soon as I move my mouse away.
A two minute redesign gives something like this:
It’s now easy to see, at a glance, what are menu options and what are links. I have removed the left pointing arrows from the sub menu to make them all look like links.
This quick design improves things straight away and would be sufficient in my opinion. If I was redesigning this site and I had more time I would probably try to remove the sub menu options completely by doing a reorganisation using information architecture techniques, such as card sorting, with a small focus group.
Oh, and I’d make sure that report pricing is displayed prominently throughout the site so that I don’t have to dig in the first place.
