Beautiful Site, but is it usable?
A co-worker shared a site with me that I find stunning: http://whatareyouwondering.com/. This site is meant to answer questions for new parents or soon to be parents.
At first glance I was overwhelmed with the beauty of the site. It's scalable and depricates well in many browsers. The concept is simple, but lovely. The questions are the content and the visual aspect of the site, is created by simply shadowing text. It is at once beautiful, human and content rich.
However, when I began to play with the site I began to notice I did not like it as much. Do a search for crying. How many results do you get?
My first search resulted in 7, but only 3 questions. The rest were repeats.
I reduced the size of my browser window and I only received 4 results. I reduced it further and I receivd 3, but all three were not viewable on my screen.
If you click on a question, you go to the March of Dimes site to get more information. Is this beautiful site enough to get me engaged and then send me over to the real site where I can find more information? Will I be satisfied as a user?
What are your thoughts? How do you marry beauty and functionality? How would you make this better?
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I love the concept and simplicity of the execution, but I agree that it has serious usability and content issues.
The thing I am taking from this little landing site is its simplicity. The concept is really elegant and hushed, and it doesn't look like it took too long to pull off. I think your experience might have been better had the list of questions been longer, resulting in less repetition. There are programmatic steps which could have been taken to further enhance the experience. But looking at the site through a broad lens, it looks like a very typical case of agency landingsite-itis: The budget and schedule allow for 98% execution, given that the final 2% of polishing and corner casing might easily consume its own budget in full.
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