AYEC: Design Issues
General Layout
The initial AYEC site was essentially a PDF of the brochure that the previous marketing firm had developed. It was a quick and dirty solution for the needs at the time and had never been re-addressed to be more contemporary, dynamic, or strategic.
The previous site has a style not seen in most websites today, with a large unchanging header that includes no navigation, and a wide left-side navigation that goes mid-way down a typical page. This fact alone is enough to make the site seem dated.
Figure 1: Home page
Add to that the use of the star and somewhat cutesy "Did you know" area that appears on several pages, and you can understand Naomi's own characterization of the site as "a little childish".
The navigation is flat, which is fine, except the ordering of the navigation buttons is not appropriately grouped to address goals. It goes from "Here's how it works" to "Get to know us", then back to "Here's how it works" in the FAQ, to "Here's what you'll get" in the college list, then back to "Get to know us" in the testimonials.
As previously mentioned, these top and left unchanging areas leave the actual page content in what feels like a small white box. It would be essential to present the content well in this area.
General Content
Unfortunately, the content in the "small white box", was only text (if you don't include the "Did you know?" parts). And not optimal text. As shown in Figure 1 above, the home page has a lot to read that says "we can do things for you" without saying what those things are until a user clicks to another page. Naomi mentioned that she needed something that would "pop" more both as a message and visually.
Content on other pages is more dense, often being bullet lists of over a dozen items.
Figure 2: Services. While organized into different services, the long lists could be further broken down to help understand the kinds of things the services do without having to read everything.
Figure 3: Accepted Colleges. The data was old, and failed to drive home the point of the page, which was NOT the number of schools, but rather that AYEC helps get students into all different kinds of schools.
The result of all this is a distinctly monochromatic look to the site, with blue text on white and some yellow in a place a visitor doesn't ever need to look at more than once. While these are the marketing/logo colors for AYEC, it can become tiresome when that is all that is there, and color alone does not provide much emotional feel.
The trend continued into other pages. In Figure 4, there is a need for more spacing between questions, for readability. In Figure 5, there is a similar need, especially when you consider the large blocks of bold text. In addition, the testimonials actually minimize the information about what schools the students actually got accepted to, reducing the effect of the testimonials.
Figure 4: FAQs
Figure 5: Testimonials
The overall effect of the text treatment on the site is to discourage reading, which makes it difficult to achieve the business goals of Validation and Differentiation.
Lack of simple tech integration
Even something as typical as a Contact page suffered from the "too much plain text" feel of the entire site. It takes very little effort to include a link to a mapping site along with address and directions, and this can even invoke a mapping app automatically on mobile.
Figure 6: Contact Us. Address, long directions, but no map.
No mobile support
Naomi admits that mobile was not a concern when the site was initially created, and frankly it is not a big concern for her now. I pointed out that at least getting the address or directions or phone number should work well on a mobile phone, and in general mobile should not be ignored, providing a usable, even if not optimal, experience. As typical for most sites that do not support mobile, the site was simply rendered in the browser to fill the width, so everything was minuscule and therefore hard to read or navigate.
