Bad Designs - Webpages

When is the last time you had problems looking for the information you want or navigating through a website? It is definitely fustrating for users to look through hundreds of links to locate the information they want in a particular webpage. Users of the internet wants information instantly at a click away, providing them the convinence they want. However, sometimes users could have a hard time looking for what they want.

My friend, CS, told me he had a hard time looking through SingTel's webpages when he was looking for information about SingNet's broadband connection. His response on the website was that it was too complicated and overloaded with information. This made his search difficult. Although there is a search function available, he would still need to go through every entry to find information he wanted. Disappointed by the webpage, he concluded that the customer service side wasn't as good as he had expected earlier and he agreed that this would construct a bad image for SingTel if the website wasn't properly set up. Hearing this i decided to go in and take a look at the website myself.

When I first got into SingTel's home page, it gave me a professional feel and the red color portion of the page caught my attention. However, when I start looking into the details,
I was overwhelmed by the huge amount of information infront of me. I did not know where to start with. The whole page is full of links! Moreover, some of those links are repeated and goes to the same page.


After a short while, I gave up looking through all the links and click on a randomly selected link. Unfortunately, I came to another page full of links again. There are also no clear header stating which page I am at. I went back to the home page and tested out more of the links. There are two homepage links at the main page but both goes to a different page. I was confused and did not know which is the real "home page".

After going through a few links I came across this page
This page is inconsistent with the other Singtel pages. It has two independent scrollbars, one for the left navigation panel and one for the main content area. Users in this case have to scroll the scroll bars individually to look through all the contents of each panel which becomes very inconvenient for them. In addition, in the main content area, most of the images are animated, each trying to catch the users' attention. However, to me, these images are distracting my focus one other areas, rather than attracting my attention.

Overall Singtel's pages have been clean and professional. However, there is too many navigation panels per page which may confuse users. Proper guidance should be provided on the page. User should have a good mental picture of the website, its linkages and how to go forward and back to its pages so as to make its usage easier. Returning users of the page should immediately know where to look for the information they want and not search all over the place again.

Finally, having a good website definitely brings a good image to its brand name. Users would be able to achieve their objectives on the website with as little time as possible. Especially when users face problems with thier products; they would want to seek help and solution as fast as possible. Websites that are complex and hard to navigate would result in fustrated users and end up with users having a bad experience with the brand. Eventually, having a good relationship with customers is an important factor to keep old customers as well as to attract new ones.

:)