This is a bit unorthodox, but I'd very much like your feedback on a big corp site. Foremost the first page and if you're feeling on a roll, the first level below the solutions (left nav w the mouseover mania).
The new design went live yesterday, and involves massive mouse-overs with (I guess) heavy preloading.
I would very much appreciate your feedback on usability and also on dl-times. (surfing by leased line does not help me much when it comes to dl-times for modem users).
I'm employed by said company, and will probably be asked to implement this design. Thus I'm seeking some opinions from this nuthouse regarding the functionality etc. I'm not too fond on the design myself, but I'd like a few second opinions.
[This message has been edited by Nimraw (edited 11-06-2002).]
From: A graveyard of dreams Insane since: Mar 2001
posted 11-06-2002 15:06
I kind of like it, nice and simple. But there is way to much white space around the 'page'. It only covers a little 'tiny' corner up in the left, maybe make it liquid or something so it fills more of the browser area. It might also look better if it was a more prominent border between the light gray background (search area, the top etc) and the white background on the page.
Why do you have the current date there? I allready know what day it is and it doesn't have anything do to with HP as far as I know...
Can't really say anything about the load time since i'm sitting at the University using cable or something else really fast now. But it looks like it can take a while for a modem user, there are a lot of pictures etc there that needs to be preloaded...
_________________________
Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
- copied from the wall of cell 408 -
i'm on a generally speedy dsl line and those mouse-overs on the left feckin devastate my experience on this page. they're slow and lag and can't keep up with my movements... frustrating, multiple ones pop on and stay kind of stuck for a second when i run my mouse over them, reponse is a second or two late... totally blows.
the date at the top definitely doesn't help matters as previously pointed out, though if it were actually integrated into the site instead of a simple line above everything i'd be down with it.
oh my god i just started screwing with the blue mouse-over menus again and now it's trying to load pictures on the other side of the page... this is ridiculous, something was either coded wrong or my browser is broken because dsl/1ghz/1gb ram should be able to handle this, right?
i'm a huge fan of static designs and... i guess for a site like hp you need to offer something for 640x480 users since you guys sell such crappy computers with tiny little 15" monitors and proprietary video cards that lick... but still, for anyone above 640x480 it's not very inspiring.
Nimraw: I'll give you a bigger review later if you need it but:
1. The site loaded quickly for me (I'm on cable modem though so fear for those in dialupville).
2. I like the simple design - far too many of these sites hit you with too much and things get messy and muddled.
3. With that in mind I suppose the fixed size of the page isn't too bad although it doesn't look great on higher resolutions.
4. My big bugbear are those rollovers - not the speed or their functionality but just the sheer percentage of page space that gets changed - possibly a half of the page changes (some quick sums later show it is actually 2/5 of the page - 0.4, not counting the actual menu itself, but it seems more because of the laid back design of the rest of the page). It is far to abrupt and feels like a slap across the face. It is really bad when you move the mouse from one to a section a couple lower down the flickering is horrible.
I'm not sure what you are referring to as solutions (I can't see anything that fits the description) so I can't give you any comments on the next level.
Overall it is a corporate site so I suppose the marketing people have to also have their say and they want to pull things in the direction of something like an online catalogue but I think it is such a bad idea to go down that road it is ugly, offputting and annoying.
I'm not sure if you have any choice over this but I think it would work really nicely if it was toned down with more use of the screen so you could get more white space in and make the changes more subtle (if you want them at all ). I think a much more Zen approach would relax people and ease them into the rest of the site at the moment those mouseovers put my teeth on edge and I just want to leave
If I were on a lpatop with a small screen and a fast connection and was overly amused with cliche "technology" related stock photography and ambigous buzzwords......I might like it.
Aside from that, in a word: ick.
Moving past the front page, yo still have the god-awful imagery to deal with , but the rest of the design works great. It's light and open, easy to visually navigate.
[This message has been edited by DL-44 (edited 11-07-2002).]
The site is waaay too heavy on images. I remember visiting HP not too long ago when I was trying to pick out a scanner. It was a different design than this, but I was on my modem at home, and it was impossible to navigate. Images took way too long to download, and the entire page was full of them - almost no text. It doesnt' look *that* much different here.
That old version of this site actually made me turn off images. I *never* turn off images in my browser; this was the only time. And then it was still impossible to navigate: no alt text. I see that the current page has alt text. Good. Make sure that stays.
But the page is still way too heavy on images. There's about 40 K of images just for a *single rollover*. 40 K is the upper bound on what an *entire page* should be! This is unnacceptable and unnecessary. The number of images needs to be reduced. Not everyone's on a T1 line. You'll notice that Mikey Milker, who said he's used to extremely fast page loading times, experienced loading times so slow that it actually confused him. What's that tell you?
Oh, and there's absolutely no reason a site like this needs such a complicated table layout. I admit that the layout is too complicated to do with pure CSS, but if CSS were used effectively, the amount of table markup could be drastically reduced. At least 70% of the presentation on this can be handled by CSS, only the basic skeleton needs tables. So there's more wasted bandwidth: all that ugly messy table markup.
So, the site's very pretty, but the execution is completely unnacceptable.
Plus, the navigation is difficult to understand - i expect some sort of menu with those >> symbols, but it looks like I'm supposed to actually click on the buttons themselves.
I can't imagine how many customers have been driven away by this. (oh, wait, you say this was just launched yesterday? eesh. put that last sentence in the future tense.)
Oh, that's just the front page by the way. The inside pages are also significantly heavy on bandwidth.
Finally, I just turned off images and it looks like alt text is used well, so that's a plus. But the majority of people shopping at HP's site won't even know how to turn off images, let alone understand that it might speed things up.
Overall opinion: *Looks* good on the outside. But it's bad bad bad bad bad under the hood.
OK, actually, this overuse of bandwidth is making me so mad that I'm going to save the front page to my hard drive and see how big it really is.
Looks like the entire front page is 320 KB. That's 1/3 of a frickin' megabyte. Do you have any idea how much time that takes to download on a modem? I beleive it's a matter of minutes. Let's see... if I remember correctly, 5 MB takes half an hour on my modem at home. 1/3 of a megabyte, therefore, should take about two minutes.
I'd like you to sit down for two minutes straight and do nothing but look at a half-loaded web page.
(By the way, I don't know if *you're* the one who actually designed this, but I figure that's irrelevant since you asked for a review of it. Take no personal offense, I say all this only in the hope that it will be changed.)
You pretty much confirms some of my issues with this design. I didn't design it (just saw it a week ago in the beta stages), and you can't hurt my feelings in any way by bashing it
My pet peeves are:
- Space
It's adapted to 800*600 when it comes to with, but it's way to low imho.
- Rollovers
This might work for a campaign site, but I'm not too happy with it for a first page.
For example the company info-menu disappears when you start messing with the rollovers.
And for a newbie to the net, I'd bet that the massive changes will be very confusing.
- DL-time
All images needed for the rollovers alone is a staggering 220kb
- Solutions (ie click on one of the rollover bars. Try enterprise on for size)
Way to cluttered imho. Try it, you might like it. Or not.
The basic design on lower levels is ok by me, but the top levels...
I'm about to send my feedback to the corp office regarding this, so all feedback is appreciated. Keep it coming!
I'll probably won't have much influence over this in the end, but such small issues have never held me back before. (I guess I'm pretty notorious within the HP/Compaq web community by now)
Slime:
Yep. Nowadays it's HP (I'm from Compaq originally, working in Sweden)
Wonder if I'll get fired for lack of loyalty if anyone sees this
[This message has been edited by Nimraw (edited 11-07-2002).]
Nimraw: Interesting question on the loyalty front. I know it was a slightly tongue in cheek remark but I would have thought that if you thought this design could harm the company (and it will lose them money) and asked the opinion of various people here then that has to be a pretty loyal thing to do
Its not that our objections are on a purely aesthetic front - they are concerns about the whole usability of the site and raise some serious questions about the designers. It may look great on their laptop with a high speed connection but what kind of testing have they done with different users on slow connections?
Lets be honest something like that might be expect (even if it is still unacceptable) from a smaller company but HP?
I say throw them the link to this page (if you are feeling bold).
Emps:
Nah, I'll just pick the goodies out from this thread, include my own elaborate rant about it and start being a nuisance to the corp people yet again. (I'll however save this page as reference if I ever need to show them the bare truth). I wouldn't want them to stalk my home turf in here, if I ever need to blow off steam
OK, tomorrow it's showtime, folks:
David against Goliath (or more to the point: me against the big wigs in the US.)
I've managed a few wins and a few losses earlier, so this rematch will be ..ehh.. interesting
Nimraw - HP and Compaq *merged*? Wasnt it meant to be hp & Compaq - I hope the developers have not forgotten this.
Also am i right in assuming that a 250K page will take a minium of 5 minutes to load on the basis that you actually get 56k bandwidth with a 56k modem (someone told me the other day that its usally more like 42k or 28k depending on the ISP)
I can see it now - "was going to buy a Brio but went dell after waiting 4 minuites for the page to load"
HP bought Compaq.
All PC's will still be branded Compaq due to the fact that Compaq was a stronger PC-brand.
Consumer PC will still be available as both HP and Compaq on some markets.
All other products will be HP-branded: HP Proliant, HP Ipaq and so on...
I lost the round with WW over the site-design though.
They communicated in a very patronizing tone, explaining very basic stuff like customer satisfaction, blah, blah. Hell, I know all of that, but I guess they didn't
All arguments were backed up with: "It's a management decision". IMHO that does not automaticly makes it right. I also was corrected, since I didn't go by the right communication process. A low level guy like me was not supposed to talk to the almighty US office. Besides they claim that they've got absolutely no negative feedback to the US webmaster for the design...
Now I'm pissed
I was also told that you can't be frank with West Coast ppl. They think it's rude, so you have to be vague and fluffy in everything you say. Anyone from the West Coast that would like to explain this to me?
*sigh* I'm starting to think I should go through the classified ads...
[This message has been edited by Nimraw (edited 11-28-2002).]
posted 11-06-2002 11:36
). I think a much more Zen approach would relax people and ease them into the rest of the site at the moment those mouseovers put my teeth on edge and I just want to leave 
