When I first visited the EU website, I was struck by how painfully dated it feels. It appears to be stuck in the early days of the internet and lacks any of the artistic and navigational sophistication that the last fifteen years of web development has perfected. For an institution known to suffer from poor communication with its constituents, 87% of whom have internet access, I would think that a proper website would be the first line of defense. There are three main qualms I have with the current EU website:
Aesthetic Design
The clothes we wear say something about ourselves to others. We may not intend for this to happen, but others will interpret anyway, however incorrectly. A website is the same way. Its quality speaks to the credibility of the institution, and therefore a user’s perception of a website typically dictates their attitude towards the organization itself. It is a necessity then, that web designers take control of the narrative and not leave it to the interpretation of others. This is unfortunately what the EU has done with their website.
There is nothing captivating about the EU site. It is bland and doesn’t keep the user’s interest. They will likely make a quick aesthetic judgement and decide that this website it not for them. To remedy this a did a mock up of two pages, including the homepage. The homepage is the most important because it gives the very first impression. I kept it simple, yet not boring. Ideally the added color and more prominent features gives the user a sense of curiosity and encourages them to further explore.
ORganizational design
While the aesthetics are what grab the user’s eye, the way a website is organized is what dictates its efficiency to the user. The organization of the current EU site might be even worse than its abysmal appearances. There are menus within menus and multiple links that forward to the same pages. Most of these pages are far too short, with minimal information requiring the user to delve deeper into the bowels of the website. A website should never be a maze.
As we discussed in class, there is a disconnect amongst many EU citizens about what their membership awards them. Brexit is a prime example of people not appreciating the inner-workings of a complicated system like the EU. For my second page I wanted to try and solve that issue by creating an extensive but not overly complex resource for these people. Now the EU website already has a page for this reason, but as previously stated, it has so little information it is hardly useful and requires “menu-diving” for additional resources, many of which jump from being too simple to being detailed policy driven documents that the average citizen doesn’t want to sift through. Therefore, this turned into mainly an exercise in consolidation. There was decent information available, it was just needlessly spread out and buried. I took this information and cut the monotonous legalese, added information that was too light, and organized it using the same aesthetic principles I ascribed above.
Editting
This wasn’t as egregious as the other two, but the EU site contains a few spelling errors and more than a few grammatical ones. I tidied these up when I found them too.
