UHH: Arts and Culture Site Review

Just because the first time was so much fun, I thought I’d throw in a review of another arts and culture website.

UHH (I don’t think it is an acronym so much as an exclamation) is a new arts and culture site seeking to ‘promote and inspire the next generation of young, creative Australians’. One of my Tweeps described it as ‘threethousand for grown-ups’ which is somewhat accurate. It could also be the online version of Dumbo feather, pass it on in terms of subject matter and style, and in the way both write articles which cause me to be impressed with what people my age are doing and also need to breathe into a paper bag because LOOK WHAT PEOPLE MY AGE ARE DOING. But that’s my thing.

The site has a pared back style, a bit fax, a bit web 1.0, a bit courier new. It is a subtle design with some unusual features – for example the main menu bar above the fold is a drop-down menu instead of horizontal buttons. It makes me feel slightly uneasy that I can’t see this straight away, although by scrolling down below the fold it is all there in technicolour.

This does not mean that it is at all web 1.0 in function; it is a fully 2.0 outfit, with commenting, rating and it seems as though there’ll be user-generated elements such as a photo gallery once the site is finished. A little thing, but I like that they have a countdown timer on the pages that aren’t ready yet. I think audiences feel so much better about non-functioning elements when it’s all explained to them.

The articles, such as ‘And you love – Sarita Jane Arnott’, are long form reviews and interviews. They are not afraid of a longer piece, but certainly convey the gist of each piece in the first paragraph. City-specific articles (the site covers Sydney, Melbourne and Perth) are cited as such at the beginning, and the writing is clear and of a good quality.

The site doesn’t use links at all in its text. I can’t think of a good reason for this, except perhaps they might be waiting until they age a bit before linking to their own content. On the one hand, it does make it easy to read without the temptation to float away on a magic link carpet. On the other, they miss opportunities to contextualise and back up their work – and it seems a bit sad not to link to the websites of the young creatives they are promoting. They do provide a short summary on the right hand side of the articles which helps one to scan the article.

The other thing I found a little disconcerting was navigating back and around the site once you are away from the homepage. Again, the drop down menu is there but I can’t shake the need to see my choices there in front of me at all times. It is a modern dilemma – design should be groundbreaking, beautiful and original, and the design of this site is all of these things. But Jakob Nielsen has also written seven reasons for standard design elements including the fact that users know where to look for standard features on the page, know how to operate each feature to achieve their goal, and don’t miss important features because they overlook a design element that is not standard. I worry this site is leaning too far away from this admittedly frighteningly functional rationale.

Overall though, the site is pretty lovely and is another advertisement for clear, well-written web content not needing to be too short. Trendy.

Digital vs traditional media: by design

In all the discussion about the death of newspapers and the appeal of online content, the importance of the aesthetic appeal of a medium is sometimes ignored. In relation to online media, it is often the usability of the site which will most significantly affect its design – and although aesthetics play a part in usability, they do not necessarily take precedence.

I think this is an area where newspapers still win. The traditional newspaper design is actually incredibly appealing and doesn’t create the same choice anxiety as an article on a webpage might. I think people like simplicity in design. I first started thinking about this in relation to newspapers after seeing this talk by a newspaper designer – here Jacek Utko talks about the effect of good design on the newspapers on which he has worked:

When I think about my online reading habits, there are three main things that keep me returning to a site. They are:

1. Relevance
2. Quality of content
3. Design

The first two are quite obvious – I am online to look for something in particular, or something to enhance my everyday experience. Relevance usually trumps the others – for example, I don’t think The Age website is of an incredibly high quality or very well designed, but it is not horrible on either of those counts and because it is local is relevant to my daily life (in general) it is my most frequently viewed site.

I will return to a site for quality of content even if it doesn’t have the other two factors – although will still be relevant in the sense I am interested in whatever it is focused on.  The accessibility and speed associated with online content has exposed us to an unprecedented level of bad writing, so when I find something that is considered and well written it is really exciting.

But it is the third factor, design, that I think is probably least discussed when considering the success /failure of websites. In our first class for Digital Media, we had to choose our favourite site. Without too much hesitation, I chose The Guardian. In terms of my three criteria for reading a site, I would rank the Guardian thus: 1. Design 2. Content 3. Relevance.  Despite the news website being very UK focused, I am happy to return because it has some interesting articles and I like to poke my head up above the Australian view of the world sometimes.

But mainly I keep returning because it is so pretty. See:

I pretty much like everything about the design of this site, both in the sense of usability and aesthetic appeal. The multicoloured double layered menu along the top acts as a colour and visual key to what you read, so that no matter how many times you click, you know how far you have gone from the homepage and how you got there.

They also use high quality images for all their tabs on the page, which can make the most unappealing  story seem interesting.  The Age could take a leave out of their book and stop publishing bad, blurring, overexposed, tabloid type photos that someone has hurriedly added text to in Photoshop.

I am constantly amazed at how few websites get design right. Obviously they cannot function under the same design theories as a newspaper, but maybe we should be thinking more about the successes of that design (not to mention the design of print magazines, which are often the most beautiful examples of content and images combined) when creating websites.

A final example is a publication, InDaily (out of Adelaide) which is hedging its bets by retaining the newspaper design online.  It is not a perfect format, not least because it kind of ignores the potential of the online medium, but there is something to be said for its hat tip to newspaper design – it is an effort to retain the simplicity which makes reading the newspaper pleasurable.